The property from above in the summer of 2022
Sorry for the late notice — we just found out about it, too
It is extremely late notice but apparently there is time.
Seattle Parks says a meeting it is holding Wednesday night to update the community on design plans for a new city park on 1.6 acres of North Capitol Hill land formerly owned by the Bullitt family will include a call for patience — it won’t have the funding it needs to complete the project until 2029 at the earliest.
Superintendent AP Diaz and the city’s parks and rec department are holding the meeting on the important updates for the planned park in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods with little public notice. It didn’t send details to media about the meeting and didn’t post about it on its social media accounts.
CHS has asked officials what’s up with the oversight and for copies of the materials to be presented so we can share the details more widely. UPDATE: Technical difficulties! Sounds like there is an issue with email coming into CHS. We’re taking a look at what’s up. In the meantime, the city says it will post a recording from Wednesday’s meeting later this week.
The land and 69-year-old home on the property left to the city after the death of philanthropist Kay Bullitt stretches out on the northwest slopes of Capitol Hill in the prestigious Harvard-Belmont Landmark District. CHS reported in 2022 on the early planning for the new park project including a survey that planners said showed preferences for developing the new park land “as a quiet, contemplative place” while making space for the Cass Turnbull Garden as part of the site, a project from Seattle nonprofit Plant Amnesty honoring its late founder.
The 1955-built A-frame style house at the center of the Capitol Hill historical district property, meanwhile, is on its way to becoming an official city landmark and would be preserved as part of the new park plan.
Parks says Wednesday’s meeting at 19th Ave E’s Miller Community Center will include presentation of “a high-level schematic concept for the future park” developed after a series of meetings and feedback efforts.
Money is a larger issue than early design ideas. Parks officials have said they were also working on developing a “rough order of magnitude cost estimate for possible inclusion in the next round of the Seattle Park District funding” but the new details mean any budgeting won’t come for another five years at least. Seattle Parks had said it was hoping to create private-public partnerships to raise the money needed to create the new park.
With a long, uncertain financial path to completing the project, officials Wednesday night say they will also be ready to “walk the community through the interim plan to keep part of the site open to the public.”
We’ll hopefully have details of how that might take shape for neighbors and visitors to Harvard Ave E soon.
HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE THIS SPRING
🌈🐣🌼🌷🌱🌳🌾🍀🍃🦔🐇🐝🦢🐑🌞🌻
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 👍
2029!! Good lord, I appreciate taking the time to do something right, but what are they building exactly that could conceivably require that long?! And surely we can keep the space active in the meantime?
The timeline is ridiculous and is very disrespectful to Kay Bullitt’s generosity in giving her property to the citizens of Seattle.
She got a massive property tax exemption for years (decades?). Agree the timeline is ridiculous, but if you gift the city a park you need to also gift the funds to maintain it.
You seem to be implying that, because Mrs. Bullitt received a property tax exemption (wonder if that’s really a fact), she left her property to the City for self-serving reasons. Quite the contrary….she did it because she was a life-long civic-minded person, and a very generous one.
Any tax exemption she received would have been worth WAY less than the value of the property, which is many millions of dollars.
I attended the meeting last year at the SAAM and it seemed like they already had a high-level schematic concept, so I’m curious to see what has changed in a year and why they keep spending money on this unfunded project rather than keeping basic infrastructure like bathrooms open…
This park is already a “yard” – and can be used as a green space.
What are the interim plans?
Will it be non-accessible to anyone for 5 years? Insane since it was a gift to the city.
If it hadn’t been a yard with a fence it would just be an open 1/4 block of grass.
Interesting how several commentators are directly or indirectly critical of Ms. Bullitt for donating the park without funding to establish or upkeep same, or for the tax advantages she may have received via the donation. I find those positions just incomprehensible. The woman donated a wonderful piece of land to the city for use as a park. She may have received some benefits, but that does not detract from her generosity in making the gift. And there is no requirement the donor provide additional funding. It strikes me as very small minded and ideological to make critical comments in these circumstances.
Like looking a gift horse in the mouth.
This town might consider some of its priorities. Taking care of parks is a core function of the city. We have spread the mandate of the city very thin with programs that are duplicative with federal funding and that end up supporting people who are not in poverty who can afford to pay on their own, for instance some aspects of our early childhood education program. City needs to be more careful how it spends funds and focus on the basics. Parks are also good for youth and mental health – something the city spends money on in separate programs. Taking care of the parks and spending money to create more would bring so much benefit in this realm.
Super excited about this new park and bummed it will take so long. But can the city please, please, PU-LEEZE do something about Bellevue Place Park, which has been a small-scale drug operation run by the “Diamond Compound” of dealers camping on both sides of the bike trail? Seriously, PLEASE activate this park and get rid of the drug dealers once and for all. I was assaulted by one of them in 2021, when I stupidly thought it was OK to continue to use the bike path, and I’ve been reporting the compound on a monthly basis ever since. This could be a great dog park or P-Patch. Just activate it, for pete’s sake!