(click to enlarge photos)

This week’s ‘then’ appears on page 151 of author Thaisa Way’s new University of Washington Press book The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag: From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design. Seattle’s Gas Works Park is Haag’s best-known victory for innovative urban design.  Since 1964. when he founded the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, Haag has gained a warranted admiration that Way has sharply surveyed and illustrated in her new book.

Haag and Way, the latter an associate professor in the department the former founded, stand together at the center of Jean’s Sherrard’s recent repeat of a slide that Haag shot long ago. Way dates it 1969.  Haag was then still scouting and studying for a proposal that one year later would bring him a commission to “prepare a site analysis, program and master plan” for a park on this Wallingford peninsula of 20.5 acres and 1,900 feet of shoreline.  Once he had the Seattle City Council’s unanimous approval, in 1972, Haag added the 45-feet-high green hillock we know and climb, Kite Hill.

On the page facing the photograph featured at the top and under a text break titled “New Eyes for Old,” Way explains that “Haag saw the dramatic site for the first time by rowboat on an autumn night and was immediately drawn to the somber black towers of the gas plant.”   She then quotes from a Haag reminiscence that reads

somewhat like a revery.  “When I get a new site, I always want to know, figure out, what is the most sacred thing about the site?  Well, this site, without the buildings, there was nothing sacred about it … So I decided that this big tower, the one right behind me, was the most sacred, the most iconic thing on this site, and that I would go down to the wire to save that structure. Then as I got into it more, I thought, that’s kind of silly.  Why wouldn’t you save the one behind it?  You know, husband and wife?”

Of course, Haag went on from there, preaching to and persuading Seattle to save almost the entire family of our “iron Stonehenge.”  And the consequences have been profound.  Next spring the Gas Works will be featured in a PBS documentary as one of “Ten Parks that Changed America.”  Way describes it as “one of the first post-industrial landscapes to be transformed into public place.”  And with the activism of the Friends of Gas Works Park, the transformation continues.  The Friends expect – and hope – to at last “free the towers,” which is to “Take down that fence that surrounds them.”  The Friends, including Haag, also plan to install a Camera Obscura (you might look it up) in the largest of the preserved generator towers and open an “interpretive center to bring recognition to the preserved structures as a collection of techno-artifacts unmatched in the world.” 

WEB EXTRAS

I’ll drop in another photo of Richard and Thaisa, standing amongst the concrete supports for the old rails:

How ’bout you, boys? Anything to add?

How can we not but follow your lead dear Jean Randall. (Is that one “L” or two?  You were using it regularly, you have told me, as a child, but now the gender ambiguous J or G word/name has long since taken over for the rugged Randal or Randall.)  Ron has put up the first list of linkable features, the more recent ones  that have appeared earlier as a main course for our weekend brunches since about 2008.   Following that we will attach some older but still relevant – by place or subject  – features and conclude with an incomplete exhibit of Frank Shaw’s many hasselblad recordings of the Gas Works in the 1970s.   In 1976 he changed from naming it the Gas Plant Park to Gas Works Park.

 

=====

ABOVE: Still on fire in 1947, and BELOW: silent and waiting for an as yet unknown fate ca. 1960.   The aerial is from the local police department.  The department’s harbor patrol had its Lake Union port beside the west side of the Gas Works.

—–

=====

—–

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

=====

======

A FEW OF FRANK SHAW’S “GAS PLANT”

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–

=======

GRANDMA’S COOKIES (MORE TO COME)

—-

—–

—–

 

—–

OTHER LOCAL GAS PRODUCERS

—–

—–

QUIZ – WIN A PRIZE TO BE CHOSEN BY JEAN SHERRARD, PERHAPS SOMETHING FROM THE FORSAKEN ART COLLECTION!  WHERE IS THIS STANDPIPE?  FIRST IDENTIFIER GAINS THE PRIZE – AND WINS IT TOO – ON A COMBINATION OF GOOD FORTUNE AND INTELLIGENCE.