Monuments: Seattle

Monument: a place that was not necessarily created for the purpose of remembrance, but exists and is preserved today as a reminder of another time.

The monument that I chose for Seattle is Gasworks. Last weekend I went there with a group of Seattleite friends, hoping to discover some more of the city that has only been my home for the past seven months. When we arrived I was struck first by the size of the pipes and then by what stood beside them. There was a playground on one side and a hill with children flying kites on the other. No one else seemed to be giving the strange location of a park a second thought, but I was very curious as to how exactly an industrial oil company had been forced to give up its land and business for a public playground. We wandered around, watching the little kids chase the geese and climb on the structures before we went home, where I looked up the strange story of Gasworks. Funnily enough even Wikipedia had a picture of Seattle's example of a gasworks, which had in fact been turned into a park. Apparently, the 20 acres of land was cleared for plant for the manufacturing of gas from coal, into crude oil, in 1906. In the 1950's the plant became obsolete because of the import of natural gas. In 1962 the city acquired the site to build the park that would be open to the public in 1975, including a picnic shelter with tables and fire grills, as well as a children's play barn, in the buildings which were formerly the boiler house and exhauster-compressor building. The vast expanses of greenery overlooking the water, the mountain, and the Seattle skyline also make the park a great attraction for weddings. Ghosts of Berlin makes continuous references to old eyesore "monument" buildings with slightly painful histories being paved over by parking lots or even plowed down for parks. It immediately drew my mind to Seattle's Gasworks park: an obsolete industrial endeavor which was converted into a playground attraction.