SEATTLE PARKS FOUNDATION Connections SPRING/SUMMER 2014 Transforming the Cheasty Greenspace When Mary DeJong and her husband Joel, moved to Seattle more than a decade ago, they fell in love with their neighbor- hood. “We knew we needed to be here,” DeJong says, stand- ing outside her home in Rainier Valley. “We also knew that we wanted to participate in something, and at the time we couldn’t really name what that something was.” That something turned out to be half a block away, just up her street: 10 acres of forest between the Lockmore neighborhood on Beacon Hill and Columbia City. This is the Cheasty Greens- pace at Mountain View, whose slopes are now covered with ferns Mary DeJong at a restoration work and other young native plants. A winding footpath reveals peek-a-boo views of the Cascades party. Photo: Tom Reese and takes hikers past benches made of cedar logs. It’s a place where DeJong and her daughter, Anna, hike (and where Anna gets excited when she finds a slug). It’s an escape for DeJong’s two boys, who outfit themselves with whistles and play. It’s also a destination for groups from the nearby Boys & Girls Club and the Refugee Women’s Alliance, who participate in wilderness camps. But back in 2003, when it was just DeJong, her husband, and a black Labrador named Jackson, this place looked totally different. “It was a drape of darkness,” DeJong recalls. “We had a dog, and we thought, ‘Oh, let’s take him into the woods.’ And it was on that first walk when we discovered, ‘Oh, this isn’t a wel- coming place.’” The place was thick with blackberries and curtains of English ivy. It was the site of homeless encampments and, as DeJong later learned from authorities, sex trafficking and other criminal activities. continued next pages Transforming The Cheasty Greenspace (from front page) The Rainier Vista housing development, which sits just down the street from DeJong’s home, had yet to be gutted and revitalized into the mixed-use planned community that it is now. The parcel of urban forest next door became very much “a calling,” she says. DeJong is fueled by a set of values inspired by John Perkins, a civil rights activist who espouses the three Rs: relocation, redistribution, and reconciliation. As an undergraduate, DeJong was deeply inspired by his teachings; the John Perkins Center is located at Seattle Pacific University, where DeJong attended college. “One of his major calls is for people to relocate to places of diversity, to help be present to a greater good. Perkins doesn’t talk about landscape or land, but this land, in some way, had been oppressed.” In 2007, DeJong reached out to Seattle Parks and Recreation to find out what could be done. That led to the Green Seattle Partnership, which put her in contact with Andrea Ostrovsky, another neighborhood resident wanting to transform the land. The pair formed the Friends of Cheasty Greenspace at Mountain View. “We started thinking about how we could reclaim and truly restore this land. And how we could reimagine it as something different,” she says. In their early days of canvassing the neighborhood for support, DeJong and Ostrovsky were met with skepticism. “Cross-eyed looks,” DeJong recalls. Some neighbors were concerned that mak- Cheasty volunteers taking a photo break at a work party. ing the place attractive could invite a new wave of illicit behavior. And not everyone could picture what DeJong envisioned—not just restoration, but making the land accessible to pedestrians in the upper part of the neighborhood who wanted easier access to the Columbia City Link light rail station below. DeJong’s group secured three grants from Seattle’s Depart- ment of Neighborhoods. They hosted work parties. They Cheasty Greenspace will provide a place for kids to play. Photo: Tom Reese Photo: Tom Reese Photo: Tom hired a landscape architect. They thought about sightlines along the trails to make them safer. “And people started getting excited,” she says. Twenty-foot-high hedges of blackberry came down, and people at the top of the slope suddenly had views. It took 7,000 volunteer hours to transform the space into what it is today. The group won the Denny Award for Environmental Stewardship for its efforts. Now DeJong has her hands full with a more ambitious project: restoring the remaining 34 acres of the Cheasty Greenspace, on the east slope of Beacon Hill next to the Jefferson Park Golf Course. This is the future home of new pedestrian trails and Beacon Bike Park, a first-of-its- kind mountain biking project in Seattle. “It’s about removing barriers of privilege to nature and to a sport,” DeJong says. The Seattle Board of Park Commissioners unanimously approved the $750,000 project in January. To win that approval, DeJong, her Steering committee, and community members worked tirelessly to convince the parks department to change its policy that banned bikes in green belts and natural areas. The board agreed to make Beacon Bike Park a pilot project. It is scheduled to open in June of 2015. “I feel like I’m a participant in an amazing story,” DeJong says. Volunteers have already offered almost $2 million worth of volunteer hours for forest restoration, trail building, and mainte- nance—including the development of Beacon Bike Park. She’s hoping for even more. A Park for Hendrix Truth be told, Maisha Barnett is not a huge, over-the-top Jimi Hendrix fan, although she enjoys his music. “I didn’t grow up listening to him,” says Barnett, who is 43 years old. “My parents were not big rock fans. I came to learn about him as a student at Garfield High School, since he was an alumnus there.” These days, however, the legacy of the Seattle-born music icon occupies a lot of her time. Barnett is the project manager for Jimi Hendrix Park, which will sit on a corner behind the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) in Seattle’s Central District. The site is currently part parking lot, part grassy field, and it sits adjacent to Sam Smith Park and the I-90 Trail. After the project is completed, park visitors will walk down a path in the shape of a giant electric guitar. “You’ll go into the frets, and there’ll be a timeline of Jimi’s life,” Barnett says. “There’ll also be a huge, sandblasted Jimi Hendrix signature,” she adds. “It’s big and confident. I kind of like that because I also have a hard time staying within the lines.” How Barnett ended up here—a former money manager who now devotes herself to community work—is the result of her involvement in another nearby park: Powell Barnett Park, a k a “Grandpa’s park.” Her grandfather was Powell S. Barnett, who worked in the coal mines of Roslyn, Washington, as a teen and who, after moving to Seattle in 1906, dedicated himself to a variety of civic causes. Not only did he bring whites and blacks together through the YMCA and the USO, but Barnett was also a musician and a semi-pro baseball player. In 1960, the city dedicated a 4.4-acre park on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in his honor. Powell Barnett died the following year. Maisha Barnett grew up thinking it was not a big deal to have a park named after her grandfather. But what was a big deal was when a group wanted to install some religious icons in the park and make some improvements—while bypassing the parks process. The city said no. Maisha Barnett: “superhero.” At the time, Barnett was switching careers and completing a fundraising management program at the University of Washington. She was looking for a project. “So I said, ‘I’ll just do Powell Barnett Park!’ I didn’t know what I was doing. I had not done anything like that at all.” She went on to lead an effort that raised $1.3 million to dramatically renovate the park in 2006. “She’s a superhero. Can’t you see the cape on her?” says NAAM executive director Rosanna Sharpe. Outside the museum, looking out at what will soon be Jimi Hendrix Park, Barnett says: “I can’t wait to stand on the grounds when it’s all torn up and construction begins.” The project breaks ground in June. It’s Time to Create a New Legacy Ken Bounds As of this writing, the Seattle City Council has an unprecedented opportunity to approve a ballot measure to establish a new parks district for Seattle. If approved by Seattle voters on August 5, the new parks district will replace the expiring levy with long-term, sustainable funding for our parks. That money will go toward replacing leaky roofs, old boilers, and outdated electrical and water sys- tems. It will fund major maintenance at Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Aquarium and ensure cleaner restrooms and more trash pickup all over the city. Staffing and programs will be restored at community centers for kids and seniors. We will be able to restore forests, protect habitat, and acquire new parks and open space to meet the increased demands of our growing population. It’s time to pause and consider the historical context of this decision. I can think of four other times in Seattle’s history when citizens and elected officials have taken action to drastically shape our parks and recreation system. The first time was in 1903, when the city council hired the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a master plan for the city’s park system, setting in motion the development of one of the most admired park systems in the nation.