(Click and click again to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Nov. 12, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Nov. 15, 2026
A parcel for produce
City-owned triangle lot in Wallingford
provided food for a neighborhood
By Clay Eals
As residential Seattle grows more dense and expensive, we may find solace in the city’s long-vacant parcels. Publicly and privately owned, these pocket-sized plots sometimes bear odd proportions — and vivid, human stories.
Take, for example, a Wallingford lot at Sunnyside Avenue and 37th Street, a 1,300-square-foot triangle with no address. Paralleling the Burke-Gilman Trail, it overlooks Northlake Way and Lake Union.
The city acquired it in 1906 when it condemned a nearby strip next to now-former railroad property. It’s one of more than 1,000 traffic islands, street ends and other small tracts owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation.
If motorists and cyclists pay attention while whizzing past the property, they will spot unkempt, waist-level sticker bushes, a cluster of Lime bikes and perhaps a parked car, bounded by a pair of light poles and 90 feet of narrow, overgrown sidewalk. But 80 years ago, this property was neighborhood lifeblood.
Lumber and coal driver John Vandyne, who came to Seattle in 1909 from the farming burg of Warnock in eastern Ohio, lived for decades at 3702 Sunnyside Ave. N. Upon retirement in 1947, he decided, without seeking permission, to cultivate the triangle across the street, soon supplying his family and nearby friends with a panoply of produce.
“We had everything,” recalls Vandyne’s grandson, Doug Munson, 89, a child in Vandyne’s household. The two worked the triangle from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. “We had corn and tomatoes and potatoes and beans and beets and asparagus. A lot of the neighbors were older, and we gave away a lot of vegetables.” Sometimes recipients returned the favor, such as a woman who shared homemade blackberry pies.
With grocery stores eight blocks uphill on North 45th Street, deliveries of milk, fish and bread were common, “so we were almost self-sufficient,” Munson says. He and Vandyne even dug a ditch across 37th and buried a hose beneath the dirt road to enable irrigation. “It was a lot of work, but he was happy with it. I wanted to go out and play with the other kids, but it was just something that was in your blood, I guess, to grow stuff.”
The triangle, with spectacular east- and south-facing views, is untended today. For it and other unpaved parcels, especially sidewalk planting strips, the city Department of Transportation issues 75-100 permits a year for gardening that doesn’t impede traffic safety.
For Munson, a Lake City resident for 60 years, it’s a wholly different era. “Things change today so fast that I can’t keep up,” he says, “but back then everything just stayed the same.”
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Greg Lange, Ethan Bergerson, Bob Carney and especially Elaine Carpenter and Doug Munson for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you will find 4 additional photos and 6 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers, Small Town Papers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.
Some alternate versions of our main “Now” photo:
