Only I’ve never, in nearly 14 years of living in the city, seen A SINGLE PERSON or animal walking thru, sitting in or even illegitimately using this poor lonely park! It’s always empty, it seems.

@ 12 The maintenance of the Freeway park is supplemented by voluntary self-assessments by the adjacent property owners.
That’s where all the colorful seasonal plantings come from.

Sabina Pade, that is a really interesting point you make. As I mentioned above there was a large Park Levy voicing to fix the parks we have instead of acquire new ones. Of course, on the other side of the coin is that land continues to be less vacant and more expensive. Thus, we should probably acquire as much park land as possible now and hope that over time, the city will build around it. This is certainly the thought of the Vulcan developers who laid down SLU Park before and not after their major residential developments.

I like the way you put it. Freeway park, as far as visual asctetic, is wonderful, but it does not yet succeed as a public space. This statement makes claim to the fact that public space involves a whole community of decisions regarding particular areas, not just park designers.

Recall however that just a few decades ago, much of Manhattan’s Central Park was ill-frequented and in disrepute.

Closer to home, that downtown Seattle was not a residential address. That Pioneer Square stood before the bulldozers. That Belltown had not yet met yuppies.

Our Tsutakawa fountain gushing unattended? Perhaps its attraction, for the moment at least, must remain largely subliminal.

Let’s check again in 5 years’ time.

Wonderful blog, BTW.

One of my favorite parks used to be on the water off of Alaskan Way South, near I guess where S. Massachusetts would be. It was a nice piece of industrial shoreline, surrounded by stacks of shipping containers forty feet high, but most of it was taken out, my guess is after 9/11.