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He died Sunday at 93. I love Halprin’s Freeway Park, especially its dark heart:

Lawrence Halprin, Freeway Park Viewing Base, 1976

Freeway Park is like a craggy mountain on its head; the summit is at the bottom. You climb down elaborate descending stairs to stand on a narrow plane with a bracing view. But this isn’t a vista. You face an ugly metal screen. A thin slice of waterfall rushes in front of it, falling from the top of the park. Through the water and the metal, you can see the subject you came all this way to look at: cars flying by under an orangey electric light, inside the concrete tunnel of Interstate 5. It’s as if the park were here first, and then the city sprung up around it, interrupted it, completed it.

This fellow’s photographs of Freeway Park and Halprin’s other works are terrific. Mr. Mudede loves Freeway park, too.

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

8 replies on “Lawrence Halprin, R.I.P.”

  1. I want to love Freeway park, but I can’t.

    Can it be said that a park is well designed if nobody uses it?

    What is the value of a thing that nobody values?

  2. @1 the park is used by the homeless, drug addicts, the insane, and old women who fancy pigeons more than their own safety (which I guess is probably comprised by the insane).

    Here’s a bit on Halprin, who’s Portland work is more substantial than his work here:
    http://www.tclf.org/pioneers/profiles/ha…

    The idea of Freeway park is decent: use a park to make over the gouge created by I-5. It’s misplaced though. Imagine how prescient such a part would have seemed had it placed between SLU and Capitol Hill. The problem with Freeway Park is First Hill and Downtown. They are both dead zones. So the park is a dead zone.

  3. I grew up playing on a Freeway Park…in fact a series of them…baseball fields and playgrounds built between North Conduit and the Belt Parkway.

    They were great…big fields and when tired I could sit on the hillside and watch all the cars below. After work my dad would put us in the swing and push us for hours until it got dark.

  4. Freeway park would be used by pedestrians more if most of the trees were gone, the elaborate concrete was gone, and the entire thing was just a grassy hill. Throw in a amphitheater in there, some good landscaping and you’d have a great place to hang out in the summer, at least.

  5. The best parts about Freeway park, hands down, are the two-foot-tall ad hoc fences, over which a person may stumble and fall a few dozen feet into high speed traffic.

  8. FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! That park is evil!
    Everyone knows that and you are just trying to make waves by suggesting overwise.
    The park is death, crime, drugs, illicit public sex and rape. I see where your values lie…

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