Notes on spaces seen through windows
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| Recluse reflections: Last chance to enjoy Freeway Park as a park Notes on spaces seen through windows |
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Saturday, October 29, 2005 Last chance to enjoy Freeway Park as a park
And on other issues...If you're downtown in the next few days, take the opportunity to drop by Freeway Park which straddles I-5 between Seneca Street and the Convention Center. Right now the park is something of an urban oasis, despite frequent and distructive meddling with it by various folks. The Parks Department cut down nearly half of the park's trees a few years ago, citing weight issues at the time. Since then, they've removed most of the bushes that once deadened much of the freeway noise, making the place a very noisy spot. Despite that, it wasn't a complete clear-cut and dozens of mature trees remained on the upper section of the park. Those trees help create the impression that many downtown high-rise workers might have of the place as a forest over a ribbon of concrete. That will end this week as the Parks Department finishes its clear-cutting agenda by removing the rest of the mature trees. But the trees seem to be bothersome to a closed and close-knit group of folks who pretend to be "friends of Freeway Park". Through the years the group which doesn't really seem to like the park all that much has spearheaded a number of initiatives to make the park, with the cooperation of the Parks Department an increasingly less natural environment. This week's clear-cutting process is, oddly enough, being presented as part of what they're calling an "Activiation Plan". These folks who hate the place so much in its current form seem to think that they'd actually use if it if only they could kick out the people who currently use the park and if the current sound-deadening tree conopy of shade were removed to let in the full roar of the freeway and remove all that nasty shade. Here's a fascinating story about the clear-cutting activists who are trying so desperately to destroy the park. In the story, a spokesperson for the clear-cutting group claims that "meeting notices were mailed to all residents in the zip code surrounding the park". Maybe. I've lived three blocks from the park for twenty years, and I don't recall seeing such a notice, but maybe I missed it in the usual flood of junk mail. It's too late to do anything about their plans which were developed with minimal outreach to most of us who live in the neighborhood. The park will be turned into something that looks like what it really is: the roof of a parking garage. The brief notion of bringing nature in its sometimes tangled and dark profusion to downtown will be replaced by a new vision of having a highly manicured suburban-style lot, maybe even with a few commercial food venders. Technorati tags: Seattle Seattle parks Freeway Park Activism posted by WebWrangler | 11:57 AM | Link | 0 comments
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