The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VIIB: Northeast (central group)

Dear Diary,

This is the smallest group of parks to cover in northwestern downtown.  There are seven in the remaining group; as I just told you, there are at least seven, more likely eight, in the group already covered in a page I thought pretty thorough at six.  But this group, as far as I know, consists of only four parks.  On the other hand, one is Seattle's oldest park, and one of the biggest downtown, which means, in the order of increasing size this series follows, it comes last in this page.

South Lake Union Community Center

The smallest park in what amounts to northwestern northeast downtown is one that doesn't exist yet.  I read a couple of articles last night about the city's sale of the "Mercer Mega Block", bounded by Dexter and 9th Avenues, Roy and Mercer Streets, in 2019.  (Actually, Google now tells me, three articles:  one, two, three.)  But I'm not telling you about it to judge it, dear Diary, but to note that once the block, currently looking like this:

gets built, it's supposed, by contract, to include a 30,000 square foot community center, which is to be rent-free for the city for forty years.  The "rent-free" obviously means the city learnt its lesson from the Belltown Community Center fiasco (though it leaves a nasty surprise for some mayor decades hence); but the 30,000 means it's to be over ten times as large as the Belltown CC as was combined with the International District-Chinatown one.

One implication:  The city probably isn't going to build its own Belltown CC.

If the center gets built, I'm guessing it would probably be bigger than this next park.

(Amazon) Grand Plaza

Well, yes, that's a pretentious name, but if you were a corporate titan putting a park adjacent to your headquarters, would you settle for less?  This plaza faces west toward Terry Ave between Republican and Harrison Streets, and I don't know when it opened - 2017 or earlier.

But it's at least a pretty good plaza.  Amazon obviously found a park designer (or more than one) willing to work with the basic idea of a concrete plaza, and talented enough to make it physically interesting even apart from such hyper-kinetic efforts to "activate" it as pursued, for example, by the Downtown Seattle Association in Westlake Park.  And then gave that designer or designers carte blanche.  They did not fall for the common tech-bro trap of thinking they knew better than the experts, and they did not stint.

My first photo can't appear in this series, but my second was of triple trash:

And after the basics came, well, not quite awe, but admiration, anyhow:

A couple of detail notes:  One sign that Amazon gave the designer(s) freedom is all those stairs.  They did install a ramp, but it doesn't go everywhere the stairs do.

And as I've already mentioned, this park's interactive electronic doodad for the holidays didn't excite me.  It's a series of rings which are supposed to provide a sonic experience as one walks through them.  (Um, again with disability blockage.  Maybe all the stairs were originally Amazon's idea after all?)  Well, having seen it done, I did walk through them, but heard nothing, and, um, the walk by itself is nothing special.

Still, Amazon's Grand Plaza is a reasonable park for the go-getters of South Lake Union, and was, at the beginning of my hike yesterday, a very pleasant surprise for me.

(?Vulcan) Denny Playfield

There are worse ways to do private parks.

I haven't found any reference to how long Denny Playfield, which is about the western 2/3 of the block between 9th and Westlake Avenues, John St and Denny Way, has been what it is now:  a big, boring lawn leading up to a full basketball court with benches and a water fountain adjoining.  (The court hasn't been re-lined in way too long, though.)

 

Apparently Paul Allen, i.e. Vulcan, bought it by the mid-1990s.  In 2014 they proposed to build on top, but nothing happened, except that sometime between then and now, the already private park got made more private, accessible by rental only:

Now there are signs about a "Proposed Land Use Action", but between the graffiti and the haze induced by changing computer systems at the renamed city department involved, I can't tell whether the signs are years or months old:

The "South Lake Union Discovery Center" next to Denny Playfield has been closed ever since the pandemic began, while museums in general have been cautiously re-opening.

Turns out this is because it isn't a museum, it's really a rental hall decorated with Vulcan's plans for developing South Lake Union.  This Center, like the playfield next to it, is frozen in time, waiting for a wrecking ball that may never come, about as un-South Lake Union as anything can be.

Denny Park

This is the third-biggest city park downtown, after Freeway and Myrtle Edwards Parks; it occupies the whole area from Dexter to 9th Avenues and from John St to Denny Way.  (Yes, that means Denny Playfield is right next to Denny Park.)  It's also the oldest city park by general acclamation, having been turned over to the city in 1884.

So it's had a long, complicated history, well covered by Don Sherwood (nearly 1M PDF).

If I understand Sherwood correctly, its present incarnation goes back to the 1940s.  It's a striking one:  the park is now a Classical garden.  Order and symmetry are its watchwords.

 

On top of that, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation headquarters are here.

 

I imagine it must have hurt department staffers a lot to tolerate a homeless encampment in Denny Park last year, and now I understand why that was one of the first encampments swept when the city got tired of obeying the CDC.

The photos above come from November 26.  This is the park I came back to tonight, convinced I hadn't done enough to show how classical it really is.  Unfortunately, since my last night visit, a mediocre but effusive job of Christmas lighting has pervaded the walkways that are one of the hallmarks of the park's classical style, so only two of tonight's photos really show anything other than those lights.  It isn't really a classical garden, because it has reasonably big stands of trees:

And yet it is, because of those sweeping, oh so orderly, walkways:

The park has two notable, recentish features carefully fitted into place between the walkways:  a playground, and a supposedly "temporary" dog off-leash area, my photo of which didn't work at all.

Speaking of temporary, so, dear Diary, will sleep be for me tonight, but I'd better get started with it.  I'll try to tell you about the ridiculously numerous parks of Cascade tomorrow night.  Good night(s) and good day(s) until then.