Credit John Olmsted and stepbrother Frederick for helping to design Seattle’s first parks. Their master plan in 1903 laid out a range of parks, boulevards and other greenspaces across the city.
The Massachusetts-based landscape architects, whose family is best known for designing New York’s Central Park, presented ideas for massive natural spaces across Seattle that are today beautiful parks known as Seward, Woodland and Discovery. The Olmsteds also suggested having a dedicated spot on the south peninsula of Wallingford facing the north water’s edge of Lake Union.
“The point of land between the northeast and northwest arms of Lake Union and the railroad should be secured as a local park, because of its advantages for commanding views of the lake and for boating, and for a playground,” the Olmsted report to the city offered.
Instead, the 9-acre site was developed into a gas-works plant in 1906 by the Seattle Gas Light Company. First fueled by huge quantities of coal heated in large ovens, the plant supplied natural gas for thousands of streetlights, homes and businesses from Everett to Kent until shuttered in 1956 when more efficient sources of gas were introduced.
In that half-century of operation, the gasification plant belched smoke thick enough to leave residue on local homes, buildings and trees. The plant was a neighbor to other industrial operations, including lumber mills, shipyards and a tar company that used coal byproducts from the gas production.
The soot and pungent smell from burning coal prompted Wallingford residents to lodge a formal complaint in 1934 and the city responded within three years by switching the plant’s fuel supply to oil. Barges filled with as much as 50,000 barrels of crude visited the site to help address the growing demand for gas. This led to more complaints about fumes and odors, and after World War II the city began a long process to unwind operations.
By the mid-1950s, Seattle tapped into the Trans Mountain Gas Pipeline from Canada to feed the area’s appetite for cleaner natural gas. The gasworks plant was turned into a storage facility for machinery and equipment.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the city moved to acquire the land and develop it into a park, just as the Olmsteds recommended some 50 years earlier. But it would take far longer to see it come true.
Property owners Washington Natural Gas Co. had a decade to clean up the area, close the pipelines, demolish tanks and other structures before vacating and returning the land to the city. The property was a mess after decades of gasification and before significant pollution laws were enforced.
The soil “had char bubbling up and oil spills all over it,” according to University of Washington historian Thaïsa Way. Sulfur, arsenic and coal tar heavily contaminated the site.
To help treat the toxic land, the city hoped to level the ground, build a retaining wall along the 1900 feet of shoreline and establish a park with swimming pool and playground.
That vision changed when, in 1962, landscape architect Richard Haag submitted a proposal that included leaving some gas-plant relics as part of an ambitious 20.5-acre pastoral/industrial mix. It wasn’t until the end of the decade before the city approved Haag’s plan over more conventional designs. (In 1964, Haag started the University of Washington’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning for landscape architect students and ran his own firm until 2016.)
Haag’s master plan led to one of the first conversions of an industrial setting to a welcoming clean-and-green zone. It included detoxifying the land and deploying early bioremediation techniques that mixed organic matter with the contaminated soil. The park includes Haag’s vision of saving several structures from the plant in what he called “Iron Stonehenge.” Haag also created The Great Mound, a 45-foot-tall green hillock better known today as Kite Hill, which includes hard-packed clay to significantly cover the most dangerous materials below. Even do this day, the city, Puget Sound Energy and the state Department of Ecology are cleaning up the North Lake Union shorefront.
Gas Works Park (one of my favorites in the city) was commemorated in 1973 and fully opened to the public for the nation’s bicentennial in July 1976, a full 20 years after the plant halted operations. The area offers some of the most breathtaking views – an evolving cityscape with the Space Needle in the distance, watercraft splashing on the lake and the occasional seaplane buzzing overhead as one takes off or lands. It is a Seattle Landmark and National Register of Historic Places listed park.
It may have taken much longer than the Olmsteds had planned but they got what they suggested in their original proposal – a park offering “advantages for commanding views of the lake and for boating and for a playground.”