UPDATE: We just received the following email from Eugenia Woo of Historic Seattle:

Historic Seattle decided to reschedule our HeartBomb at Gas Works Park because of the Seahawks parade on Wednesday, February 11.

The HeartBomb is now scheduled for Tuesday, February 17. Meet at NOON; photo around 12:10/12:15 pm.

On Jan. 21, 2026, the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board voted 5-0 (with two recusals) to table Seattle Parks’ proposal for Gas Works Park, with conditions for Parks to address.

(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Jan. 21, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Jan. 25, 2025

Past, present, future:
Balancing safety and art at Gas Works Park

By Jean Sherrard

(Reader’s Note: This column is being published a day early to coincide with today’s pivotal Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board meeting regarding the fate of the Gas Works towers.)

In February 1971, 13-year-old Peter Steinbrueck accompanied his father, architect Victor Steinbrueck,

to an abandoned industrial site on the north shore of Lake Union.

The coal-gas plant had been shuttered since 1956. Its towers, pipes, and vats were widely regarded as toxic leftovers — candidates for removal rather than reverence.

But camera in hand, Peter saw something else.

“I was just a kid exploring,” he told me recently. “But even then, you could feel the power of it.”

While his dad sketched the two dominant towers from the ground, Peter photographed him at work, capturing a moment when the site’s fate hung between erasure and reinvention.

Even then, its uncertain future had drawn the attention of landscape architect Richard Haag. He had come to Seattle to help establish the University of Washington’s landscape architecture program at

Victor Steinbrueck’s encouragement. Haag proposed transforming the abandoned gas plant into a public park — a radical idea at the time.

Haag never sugarcoated the site’s condition. “It was awful,” he recalled in a 2015 interview. “I just thought, ‘God, what a horrible place … What an ecological disaster.’”

But where others saw only blight, Haag saw possibility — and a design problem to solve.

With no forests or rock outcroppings to anchor a conventional park design, Haag camped on the site, sleeping beneath the towers, waiting for the place to declare itself.

It did, unmistakably.

Facing fierce public opposition — particularly from the

family of late City Council member Myrtle Edwards, who viewed the plant as an ugly stain on the lakefront — Haag defended the towers in public hearings by turning them into characters.

The largest became “Myrtle Edwards.” The one behind it, standing in her wake, became her husband.

“Wait a minute,” Haag realized. “Here’s a whole family.”

By anthropomorphizing what critics dismissed as junk, Haag reframed industrial debris as presence — what he later called “obdurate objects,” refusing to disappear. When Gas Works Park opened in 1975, the towers remained.

A half-century later, the skyline has risen around Gas Works Park, but the vision of open engagement has narrowed.

In 2015, Haag and historian Thaisa Way publicly argued to “Free the Towers” — remove the fencing around them and allow visitors to walk among the structures as sculptural ruins.

That hope has collapsed with tragedy. Since 2012, at least three people have died after falling from the park’s structures, most recently a 15-year-old boy in July. Eleven others have been injured in the past decade, some suffering broken bones or brain damage.

In the aftermath of those accidents, grieving parents called for the site to be declared a public hazard. The city, facing anguish and liability, confronts a painful question: Has preservation of the structures become untenable?

For now, Seattle Parks & Recreation has reinforced the fencing that encircles the central tower complex.

Noted Seattle public artist John Fleming finds the fencing dispiriting — visually dominant, hostile in tone and, as the tragedies have made clear, no guarantee of safety. It leaves the city trapped in a seemingly impossible binary: leave the hazard as it is, or remove it entirely.

“Do we cut down our trees because someone might climb one and fall?” Fleming asked during a recent visit. “You can’t eliminate all risk from the public realm. We have to live with facts on the ground,” he continues. “But that doesn’t mean tearing everything down.”

Fleming — whose public art includes “Western Tapestry” along Western Avenue below Pike Place Market and “Grass Blades,” an installation at Seattle Center composed of 110 tall, brightly colored vertical metal pieces — has an idea for a third way: a protective wrapper encircling the tower complex.

In his concept, a smooth, serpentine wall of colorful panels weaves around the rusting Gas Works bones. It would be impossible to climb and could rest lightly atop the capped, toxic soil, avoiding deep foundations.

The proposal is practical and philosophical.

The towers would no longer beckon as a playground. But instead of a fence that shouts “keep out,” Fleming describes his proposed art wall as a tribute — both to the historic structures and to the imaginative impulse that first saved them.

WEB EXTRAS

Update: John Fleming’s “Third Way” Perspective

Following the publication of this column, artist John Fleming shared with us a letter he has drafted for the Seattle Times. Writing in response to a previous reader’s letter regarding safety at the park, Fleming argues that the current “middle path” offered by the city is actually a plan for erasure.

John describes the Parks Department’s December 2025 eighty-five page “Pedestrian Appurtenance Removal Report” as a failure of imagination, noting that if their plan is followed—removing every item rendered in red in their drawings—the historic character of the site will be lost.

Countering the “Red Zone”

In a follow-up exchange today, Fleming provided an illustration to counter the Parks Department’s proposal to strip the structures of their “danger.” By taking the city’s own drawings and adding an 11-foot high gray band at the base, he illustrates a simpler, more surgical alternative.

Fleming notes that since the city’s own reports state that 99% of people cannot scale an 11-foot barrier without assistance (like a ladder or rope), a targeted barrier in the 11-to-15-foot zone could effectively keep climbers out while saving the historic “red” elements above that line.

As John notes in his response to the Times:

“I am writing in response to Tim O’Connor’s letter claiming that Seattle Parks Department has presented a well thought out middle path… The report includes detailed drawings with items rendered in red for removal. If you take away everything marked in red, all that is left are nine or ten tall smooth cylinders, hardly what we think of as our historic Gas Works.

We’ve been stating that we don’t want to cut down our trees to prevent young people from falling out of them. SPD’s so called middle path is like cutting all the branches off so we’re left with telephone poles.”

His vision reminds us that treating these industrial relics with the same respect afforded to high art might finally shift public behavior from hazard-climbing to appreciation.

For our narrated 360-degree video of this column, head over here.

Also, Peter Steinbrueck shares his astonishing never-before-seen photos of Gas Works, snapped in February 1971 when he was just 13 years old.