♪♪
(birds chirping)
[Phillip Vogelzang] Discovery Park,
it is so many things to so many different people.
I like to think of it
as Seattle's greatest restoration project.
It has changed hands many times.
One of the beauties of Discovery Park is that
it's a place that is defined by its master plan,
(frogs ribbiting)
where the citizens of Seattle
have collectively said, "We want to make this place
for nature." For over 4,000
years, the first people of the Salish Sea
have utilized the generous bounty of the waters
and land now known as Discovery Park.
[Warren KingGeorge] A unique area
that had both saltwater
foods and upland foods that were available
to the first peoples of this area.
Because PKa'dz Eltue is the word
we used to identify that village
that was kind of tucked away there in what's now
called the West Point treatment facility.
♪♪
It was literally a paradise.
(elk bugle)
[Narrator] In the mid 1800s, European settlers
came to Magnolia as subsistence farmers.
As Seattle grew, its economy emerging,
developers and bankers began
to divide up land for public and private use
with increasing economic motives.
In 1886, King County commissioners relayed
a wish to have a permanent garrison in Seattle,
offering land free to the Army.
The Seattle Chamber of Commerce was energized
into action, knowing a fort would bring revenues
to an economically struggling city.
The Chamber lobbied the Army in earnest,
putting together a complicated acquisition plan
to buy and trade land, then given free to the Army,
on behalf of the city.
Fort Lawton was placed on Magnolia Bluff,
with only a faint nod to strategic placement.
♪♪
(horse trotting and footsteps)
By 1964, it was clear that Fort Lawton did not fit
the modern military defensive needs of a nation.
A citizens committee, planning the major
Forward Thrust bond in 1965, included
$3 million as seed money for a park at Fort Lawton.
In early
1968, Seattle voters approved this bond issue.
25 civic and environmental groups, led by U.S.
District Judge Donald S.
Voorhees, organized the Citizens for Fort Lawton
Park.
♪♪
[Mike Ruby] The first stage of acquiring the post
was when Don Voorhees and Bob Kildall, and myself,
sort of sat around
and said, "How are we going to make this happen?"
Well, the key actor in this, of course, was Don
Voorhees and his relationship with Senator Jackson.
[Phillip Vogelzang] Don Voorhees knew how to play
that political game and was very methodical
in making all the right moves
and contacting the right people
and lobbying for creation of the park.
(shuttle roars)
[Narrator] In 1968,
the Department of Defense announced plans to level
330 fort acres to build an anti-ballistic missile base.
The Citizens for Fort Lawton
Park protested, seeking action from Washington's U.S.
Senator Henry M.
Jackson, one of the senators who proposed the missile site
be at Fort Lawton. [Sen.
Henry Jackson] It seems to me that this area,
in the heart of the city, is one of our last open
areas available for park purposes.
It has all of the requirements that I see is necessary
if we're going to plan ahead and provide
for the kind of environment that we should have in this
great metropolitan area.
♪♪
posed this concept of post to parks,
which had implications all over the United States.
So this is all, as a result of this effort
to bring Fort Lawton
onto Seattle as a park
in a way that Seattle could afford it.
[David Towne] Fort Lawton would not have happened
if it hadn't been for that bill, because it included
the no compensation transfer of surplus federal lands.
[Mike Ruby] The next set of discussions,
was how many
of those buildings, that the Army was walking away
from, would stay, and how many would be torn down,
and which ones?
And this led to an extended discussion with folks
at Historic Seattle and other historic preservationist.
♪♪
And of course, there were people like me,
who were pushing for
all the buildings to come down because we wanted to have it
as much a wilderness park as possible.
[Narrator] In the end,
the City Council passed legislation, saving seven
historic military buildings to stand as empty,
silent memorials to the old Army base.
♪♪
[Phillip Vogelzang] It was an age of cooperation, and I think it's something
that we don't appreciate now,
but when you
think back in the '70s, there's very much a spirit
of let's come together, let's make this happen.
We can all do this together.
[Mike Ruby] It was so large they said, "You
can't have a park this large.
How could the city possibly afford to maintain it?
We can build houses here."
[David Towne] The number of different groups
that wanted a piece of Discovery Park
or Fort Lawton, as it was then known, every
one of them was a fight
and debate and
ongoing issues, and Fort Lawton was no different.
We had the historians, we had the Army
who wanted to kind of preserve that memory.
Then we ended up with the United Indians.
[Narrator] In 1970, Northwest Native Americans
peacefully occupied and protested outside Fort
Lawton for over three weeks.
(crowds yell)
Led by Colville native Bernie Whitebear and Puyallup Bob
Satiacum to reclaim land for local urban Indians.
U.S. Indian treaties promised reversion of surplus
military lands back to their original owners.
This protest garnered much media coverage
and public pressure forced government
leaders to meet the United Indians of All Tribes Council
at the bargaining table.
After five months
of negotiations, a renewable lease for 20 acres
to the United Indians for 99 years was granted.
♪♪
[Mike Ruby] Once it was clear
that the fort was going to come to us as a park,
we needed to develop a vision for the park.
And that was
where we were involving Dan Kiley
in his development of the master plan.
And there were quite a number of citizen groups
from the League of Women Voters to the Audubon Society
to Sierra Club, all these different
organizations to sit on a committee
to work with Dan Kiley and tell him what we thought.
Getting Dan Kiley in here to do that, was into itself,
I think, a real victory alone to find him and get him
to willing to come to Seattle
and look this over and write that plan.
When he saw it and said this should be a wilderness park,
we felt that we'd really made a great step forward.
The original proposal by Kiley for what to do with Fort
Lawton was really key to convincing everyone
that this was a good idea and this is what we should do.
And the idea of having it primarily a place
that is not developed, we didn't want Ferris wheels
and amusement parks and things like that in it,
and he understood that.
He really understood that very well, and he was
quite good at
giving us the grounds to argue for that.
But the idea of a wilderness
park was really inherent
in what all of us wanted to accomplish,
and that was really in the Kiley master plan.
And so as the plan was translated into something
that the Parks Department could adopt
in their own wisdom,
their own way of viewing the world
and their language, we, of course, had to
struggle with them I guess.
I think that's the right word to struggle with them
to get as much of the Kiley master plan and that vision
of a wilderness park in place.
♪♪
[David Towne] The Master Plan philosophy was
we've got a lot of active parks.
What we need is a passive park,
one that allows people to reconnect with nature,
the environment, to recharge their batteries,
so to speak, and be enjoyed by a broad range of people
rather than special interests that have a particular
activity that they want to pursue.
And that held up.
It was criticized as being
interesting, a kind of an elitist Eastern attitude,
because Kiley was, of course, East Coast.
But that was overcome
and because there was lots of support for
not doing major development
there.
♪♪
[Phillip Vogelzang] As we celebrate
these 50 years of amazing success,
we have to temper it
with looking forward, what's going to happen in 50 years?
Where is this park going be?
What's it going to look like?
The pressures, the numbers of people
that are visiting the park.
Like all our greenspaces,
they're going to be stressors and stresses on this park
that we need to think about and we need to plan for.
And most importantly, we need citizens to stand up
and say we need to take care of this place.
And I'm confident that the citizens of this city
are going to do their best to take care
and to steward this park into the future.
(eagle calls)
♪♪
[Warren KingGeorge] There are locations
within Discovery Park where you get to experience
that peace and quiet, that tranquility of 4000 years ago.
♪♪