Top 3 Parks to Visit: Gas Works

**This article is Part 1 of a 3-part series dedicated to the histories of three prominent parks in the Greater Seattle Area.

As the summer kicks into gear, you may find yourself wanting to spend some time in one of the many amazing city parks we have in the Seattle area: Discovery Park, Seward Park, Lincoln Park…the list is long. There are many wonderful parks to choose from and they each have their own unique character. You may not know that Seattle is also home to three very distinctive urban parks that hold singular status not only in the city but in the nation as a whole: Gas Works, Freeway, and Jack Block. These parks were created out of a civic desire to reclaim industrial and heavily polluted sites within the city and repurpose them into public green spaces. If you have never visited them, take some time out this summer to experience these eccentric, yet awesome, parks.   

Probably the best known of the three, Gas Works is gorgeously located on the northern shore of Lake Union. While popular for its panoramic vista of the Seattle skyline and as a prime location to observe fireworks, it’s also a delightful place for picnics and flying kites! The history of this park is a worthwhile reminder of how the poisoned real estate left behind by reckless industries can be rehabilitated when a city government takes up the challenge to detoxify and reclaim the land.

Gas Works industrial remnants / Park Preview Blog

In 1906, the Seattle Gas Company obtained the peninsula on Lake Union upon which they constructed a coal burning gas plant. It remained in operation until 1956 when the site was abandoned and, with it, all the leftover toxins and pollutants from 50 years of burning coal. The City of Seattle purchased the land in 1970 and hired renowned landscape architect, Richard Haag, to develop the nineteen acres into a public park. Haag had to wrestle with two huge problems: what to do with the abandoned refinery structures, and how to clean up 50 years of accumulated industrial waste. His decisions were not only surprising but innovatively game-changing in the world of urban renewal.

Instead of tearing down the refinery towers, which most planners assumed he would do, Haag decided to, as he put it,  “thin the forest.” In a sense, he edited the huge mass of industrial towers, pipes, stacks, and buildings to visually enhance the park itself…in other words, he turned the polluted skeleton of an ugly factory into public art. He also repurposed structures; the boiler house became a picnic shelter, the former exhauster-compressor was transformed into a play barn for children, and all of the extraneous industrial material was piled up and buried to create the Great Earth Mound.

The most innovative aspect to Haag’s reclamation of the land, however, had to be the bioremediation strategies he incorporated into its design. The process of bioremediation is the use of biological systems (typically bacteria, microalgae, and various forms of fungi) to remove environmental pollutants. Instead of simply cleaning out the industrial waste and moving it to another location (i.e. not really doing anything about it), Haag and his engineers decided to leave the waste onsite and have nature do its thing by degrading the pollutants organically over time.  Not only was this more eco-friendly, it also saved money (something the city found attractive, no doubt). 

You can actually witness the process of bioremediation occurring at Gas Works! The aforementioned Great Earth Mound is not just a pile of buried industrial waste; it’s actually an environmentally powered factory slowly breaking down all of the various pollutants into non-toxic gasses that are then vented through pipes you can see poking up through the green grass. 

The winner of many prestigious awards over the years, Gas Works Park was registered in the National Registry of Historic Places in 2013. Go fly a kite!