By Juan Jocom

The Black Lives Memorial Garden has been cleared from Cal Anderson Park but efforts to mark the events of the 2020 protests and create a lasting connection to the movements and communities that centered around this Capitol Hill public space that summer are continuing.

A University of Washington professor who successfully helped lead the transformation of the International District’s Hing Hay Park with community elements and expanded features is continuing a process to harness student ideas and design concepts that could someday do the same in Cal Anderson.

Jeff Hou, Landscape Architecture Professor at University of Washington and the director of the Urban Commons Lab, is moving forward on a studio project this winter to take action on creating inclusive solutions for Cal Anderson.

“We need to be respectful of multiple interests and identity and we want to bring as many people to the table and making sure that the design can serve a wider audience,” says Hou.

Others aren’t waiting for a design studio.

Late last Thursday night, Seattle Police stood by as Seattle Parks rangers cleared the park in a rare enforcement of Cal Anderson’s posted 11:30 PM closure time. A “mutual aid” group that had put up canopies and a fire pit near the area of the cleared garden refused to budge.

Seattle Police says the group of about 10 finally complied under threat of arrest and cleared the park.

They were soon back making it clear that parks can rip the garden out, but the park’s place as a gathering area for encampments and mutual aid efforts will continue.

CHS reported here in December as the city finally removed the Black Lives Memorial Garden, clearing the garden’s hand-built structures and plots from the fenced-off area on the south end of the park on the Wednesday morning of the quiet holiday week after Christmas. As part of the removal, parks noted that the space was also cleared of campers — the 76th time the park had been swept.

Seattle Parks said the garden needed to be removed for a planned “turf restoration” project in the park’s grass bowl area that officials said is required “to host gatherings and large events” as part of its “intentional design as a natural amphitheater and proximity to electrical and water hook-ups.” Seattle Parks says it offered to work with the Black Star Farmers group that helped shape the initial garden and that stewarded the space over the years to relocate the garden in the park or move it to another location including a space behind the Rainier Community Center.

But there was more to the removal than a bit of grass.

Cal Anderson Park Alliance community discussions that began in the wake of CHOP included groups and advocates working to take on new projects around the park. But no official plans for increased services and outreach, or resources like phone charging stations, rain shelters for mutual aid providers that some have advocated for were ever put into motion.

Parks officials have said future “dialogues” about changing the park must include “all residents and stakeholders to advance Cal Anderson forward and to ensure our park system continues to shine brightly for Seattle,” a response to criticism that early talks about Cal Anderson in the wake of CHOP focused too much on outgrowths of the protests including the possible creation of a permanent Black Lives Memorial Garden in the park.

But there have been renewed efforts to make smaller upgrades. Developer and property manager Hunters Capital that owns the park adjacent Broadway Building and ended up on the winning end of the city’s $3.6 million CHOP lawsuit settlement last year has been active in shaping how Seattle Parks attends to Cal Anderson including working with community group Caring for Capitol Hill to host community clean-ups in the space.

The Cal Anderson Park Alliance has also reestablished its leadership around the park, organizing public safety meetings about the park that raised issues about everything from rats to off-leash dogs.

In May, CAPA called on the city to address the “drug market” that has taken shape on Nagle Place along the west edge of the park with safety and lighting upgrades after a double homicide took the lives of two brothers on the street.

The UW studio project will be shaped by this challenging background. Hou will be leading a studio with 15 students at University of Washington with the focus on “community engaged design” to rethink areas of the park and find possible homes for community-minded elements that evoke the spirit of the Black LIves Matter movement while making Cal Anderson better for everybody. Hou is hoping to ultimately have this program “help facilitate a dialogue among the different stakeholders.”

One of Hou’s previous projects is Hing Hay Park in the International District that has won accolades from APA Washington Chapter, ASLA Washington Chapter, and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

The studio is a starting place for ideas and creativity before a wider conversation.

According to Hou, the studio will run independently and will not be funded by the city or any groups, “I don’t necessarily want to take sides,” stating his stand about the garden, “I don’t want the student to be influenced by my own opinion, and obviously, everybody is entitled to their own thoughts, perspective and their value system. But I wanted the studio to be a place where people from different perspectives can actually come together and help have an open conversation.”

And inclusivity is what Hou hopes to build on, although he will not be directly working for the city, he still wants to make sure to include diverse voices ranging from parks representatives, to the Black Star Farmers, and to some of his colleagues like Keith Harris who teaches in the Landscape Architecture department, and the Urban Studies program at University of Washington and has been an active participant in efforts to shape community uses in the park.

In addition to helping the communities around Cal Anderson, Hou thinks the project will be a learning space for the student who will be involved with the studio.

Hou also said the studio could help get the discussion around community uses in the park back on track. “In the immediate aftermath [of CHOP], there was an effort led by parks to think about what would be a way to make the park more inclusive. My hope for the studio is to go back to that process.”

Ensuring a solution where every voice involved feels well represented, especially with the topic about the future of BLMG, can be difficult to achieve, so Hou encourages people to reach out to him if they want to participate in this work.

Seattle Parks, meanwhile, did not respond to questions about the UW project.

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