If all goes according to schedule, Judkins Park could have a new skatespot by next fall. Design planning is underway on the project, which is planned for the grassy area south of Judkins Street and west of the tennis courts.
The first public meeting was last week, and the project manager said the idea has been well-received so far.
“People seemed excited about it coming to the area,” said Kelly Davidson, Project Manager with the Seattle Parks Department.
The project is budgeted $600,000 from the Parks and Green Spaces Levy, and the site is part of the 2007 city-wide skatepark master plan.
The Judkins site is one of six larger projects recommended in the master plan for prioritized funding. As a “skatespot,” the plan calls for a medium-sized skatepark up to 10,000 square feet in size. “District” skateparks called for in the master plan would be up to 30,000 square feet, and a “regional” skatepark at Magnuson Park would be even larger.
The master plan also notes future plans for a skatespot at Pratt Park and a skatedot (often a single skateable feature) for the Medgar Evars Pool area.
The second community meeting will be held sometime in the fall, possibly in late September. At that point, the design firm will present some design concepts. The mostly-final design will be unveiled at the third meeting, likely in November or in early 2012. Construction could begin in February and finish in September.
For those interested in watching some nitty-gritty design details get discussed, the Skatepark Advisory Committee will discuss the Judkins park at their September 12 meeting, 6 p.m. at 100 Dexter Ave.
For more information, visit the project website. Here’s the Powerpoint presented at last week’s meeting, which includes images from other parks and some early project details:
Cant wait for this to get built. Hoping it raises the desirability of this neighborhood.
the city closes down the libraries for a week, but yet it is able to find $600k in the budget for something stupid like this?!?!???!!! great, now we will get to dodge these idiots on their boards…
HOW MANY AFRICANS U KNOW KNOWS HOW TO SKATE AND WHY WOULD YOU PUT IT AT JUDKINS AND NOT ON PINE STREET WITH THE REST OF YOUR BUDDYS.WHY DONT YOU DONATE THAT MONEY TO THE BLACK HISTORY MUSEUM
WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?YOU MEAN TO TELL ME WITHIN THE NEXT SIX YEARS WITH 145,500,000 DOLLARS THAT ALL YOU WANT TO PUT IN MY COMMUNITY IS A SKATE PARK….PLEASE…THIS IS THE CENTRAL DISTRICT AND THIS IS THE HEART OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY AND NEXT TO THE BLACK HISTORY MUSEUM….WHY IS IT THAT YOU WASTE YOUR TIME AT TOWN HALL MEETINGS FOR DUMB IDEAS LIKE THESE…HOW ABOUT DONATING THAT MONEY TO THE BLACK ORGANIZTIONS WHOSE WORKING IN OUR COMMUNITIES HAVE HELP CHANGE THE WAY YOUTH THINK AND WORK AND ACT…IF THERE IS SKATERS ON JUDKINS OR CLOSE TO IT WE’D BET YOU THEYRE NOT FROM THIS COMMUNITY BORN AND RAISED…
59% voted for this tax hike. If you’ve lived in Seattle for more than 11 days you shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2008/10/07/election-2008-
http://www.seattle.gov/parks/levy/
I think it would be sweet if a bunch of black kids got skateboards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcezId9zlRk
is it a bad thing if black kids pick up skateboarding?
i thought this would be a good thing – the kids in the CD (inclusive of all races)need better recreational opportunities in the neighborhood.
with the skate park, now maybe the kids in the neighborhood (inclusive of all races) will have something better to do instead of spending time scoping out houses to break into while people are at work during the summer.
its a pretty cheap way for a kid to spend their time; you can get a new deck and wheels for under 100$ and then there is craigslist where you can always score a good deal on a used board.
Why don’t you look at the people and not the color of their skin? Isn’t that what you want everyone else to do? We should be happy they are adding any good things to this area with attitudes like the caps lock one above. Look at the personalities of people and not their skin color if you want change.
Hey great idea T. Hillis.
Make sure you type in ALL CAPS so nobody can miss what a racist dumbass you are. Good call!
Just so you know, some of the best skaters in the world are black.
I think that it is great that the white kids will have something to do while the black ones are learning pimping and dealing. We need to embrace this.
Get used to people not your color. The Japanese and Italians got used to it when your race moved in to the neighborhood.
it would be a good time to discuss some of the larger history of the Central District too.
In 1882 William Grose, an early black pioneer in Seattle, bought 12 acres of land in Madison Valley from Henry Yesler. That was then “the country”, thickly wooded and a long way from the hub of activity along the waterfront. But when the Madison Street Cable Car began service in 1889, it made the area accessible to other citizens and more black families began to move into the area and started a community.
For the next 50 years, Madison Valley and the hill up to 23rd would continue to be the geographic heart of the city’s African American community.
Discrimination helped make sure it stayed that way, even as thousands of new black families moved to the area during World War II. That discrimination, most of it informal but strictly enforced, made the Central Area the city’s only major African American community BECAUSE it was the only place where black folks were allowed to live up until very recent times.
Although racial discimination was always technically against the law in Washington State, ENFORCEMENT was rare. According to the UW Civil Rights and Labor History Project, many private businesses in Seattle REFUSED to serve minorities, including African Americans and citizens of Asian descent.
Even large hospitals such as Swedish, Providence, and Virginia Mason refused to treat black citizens up into the 1940s.
Nowadays many suburban housing developments come with restrictions that limit what color you can paint your house or how you must maintain your lawn. They’re called housing covenants or deed restrictions, and they are an enforceable contract you accept as a condition of buying that property. Historically, much of the land in Seattle came with similar restrictions. But instead of focusing on paint or allowable vegetation, those old covenants forbid property owners from SELLING or lLEASING to minorities.
Neighborhoods all over the city contained such clauses in their deeds, including Queen Anne, Ballard, Alki, and even Capitol Hill. Here’s the clause from the deeds in part of Beacon Hill:
No person other than one of the Caucasian race shall be permitted to occupy any portion of any lot in said plat or any building thereon except a domestic servant actually employed by a Caucasian occupant of said lot or building.
Although the US Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948, it left individuals free to continue to discriminate however they wished. A white family was still perfectly within their rights to refuse to sell a house to an African American family. And landlords could also decline to rent an apartment or house to minorities without facing any legal problems.
This informal pattern of discrimination continued up into the 1960s, helped along by real estate agents who practiced “red-lining”, refusing to sell home in white areas to minorities. You can see how effective those practices were in this map, where each dot represents 25 black residents in Seattle in 1960. The lines of demarcation are incredibly exact: Madison on the north, 34th on the east, and Irving street to the south:
Change came slowly. In 1964, a ballot measure to enforce open housing rules in Seattle failed by a 2-1 vote. The city council only moved forward on a ban on housing discrimination in 1968, following the passage of the national Civil Rights Act of 1968, which outlawed such practices nationwide.
It wasn’t until then that the region’s African American population began to spread out for the first time. The UW has some interesting maps that show that South Seattle was the first area to see more diversity by 1980, followed by parts of North Seattle and other parts around the county by 2000.
Originally published November 13, 2008 at 12:00 AM | Page modified November 13, 2008 at 11:20 AM
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UW project sheds light on Ku Klux Klan as force in the state
Never-before-seen images are shining new light on a grim chapter of Washington’s history, when the Ku Klux Klan operated from state headquarters in Belltown, and helped elect public officials across the state.
By Lornet Turnbull
Seattle Times staff reporter
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WA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Klan members gather at the Crystal Pool at Second Avenue and Lenora Street in Seattle in March 1923.
Trevor Griffey
Information
The university’s project: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/
Never-before-seen images are shining new light on a grim chapter of Washington’s history, when the Ku Klux Klan operated from state headquarters in Belltown, its members gathering — robed and hooded — at what longtime Seattleites might remember as the Crystal Pool.
The additions to a University of Washington Web site came about as part of a senior-level history class. The rare photos and newspaper clippings tell of the Klan’s broad presence in this region during the 1920s.
There’s the Sedro-Woolley wedding of Klan members in full regalia, a night parade in Bellingham and rallies in places like Renton and Issaquah that at times drew crowds of up to 50,000.
The KKK helped elect public officials across the state — including a mayor in Kent during the early 1920s — and published a Seattle-based newspaper called the Watcher on the Tower.
“People in Washington state really have not known about the strength or impact of the KKK here during the 1920s,” said James Gregory, UW professor of history who heads the Web site, called the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project.
Finding few blacks at which to aim their venom in the pre-World War II Northwest, the white supremacists here focused instead on the Roman Catholic church and on foreigners.
“Historians focus on the Klan as a powerful force in places like Oregon, in Midwest states and of course in the South. But the Klan had tens of thousands of members right here in Washington,” Gregory said.
Class made discovery
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by veterans of the Confederate Army to restore white supremacy in the wake of the Civil War. With a record of intimidation and violence aimed at blacks, Jews, foreigners, Catholics and labor, the KKK was prosecuted under the Civil Rights Act of 1871. But it rose again, reaching a membership peak of 5 million in the mid-1920s when its reach spread far beyond the boundaries of the Deep South.
Its inclusion on the Web site is part of ongoing research on civil rights and labor in the Pacific Northwest by faculty and students at the UW.
Discovery of many of the photos and other documents came about as part of a fall 2006 history class called White Supremacy in Western Washington. “Much of this is information that is known to experts, but now the Internet is providing an opportunity for it to be made publicly available,” said history doctoral student Trevor Griffey, who led the class and did much of the research.
“Flaming crosses and Klan robes are some of the most powerful and horrifying images that we identify with a history of racism in the United States,” Griffey said. And in places like the Northwest, where many believe the Klan was not a force, it can be hard to document the history of racism.
“This forces us to rethink some of the assumptions about the history of this region and opens up a new question: Exactly how liberal has this place been?”
As part of its resurgence, the KKK successfully organized in Oregon before coming to Washington around 1923. There is no evidence it was as violent here as it had been elsewhere.
Presence into the ’30s
Klan leaders appealed to people’s Christianity, their patriotism and a fear of foreigners. Records show that, along with a Kent mayor, a city attorney in Bellingham was an open member of the Klan. In fact, in 1929, when the Klan held its state convention in Bellingham, its grand wizard was introduced by the mayor and given a key to the city.
Rallies in places like Issaquah, Yakima and Renton drew crowds of up to 50,000. “Those weren’t all Klan members,” Griffey said. “What’s amazing is that they were able to draw such participation. You didn’t see much organized resistance, not much attempt to disrupt the Klan meetings.”
Many of the photos on the Web site were obtained from the Washington State Historical Society, which bought its collection from the estate of Tacoma photographer Marvin Boland, himself a Klan member.
The Klan’s undoing — at least in Seattle — began around 1924, after it unsuccessfully backed an anti-private-school initiative in this state, aimed at Roman Catholic schools, similar to one it had pushed through in Oregon that was repealed. That plus internal scandals led to the beginning of the Klan’s demise.
But it retained a presence here through the 1930s, its power base shifting from Seattle to Bellingham, said photo historian Jeff Jewell, with the Whatcom Museum of History & Art.
“Hardly a semester goes by that the subject of the Klan is not part of somebody’s term paper,” Jewell said. “It’s been very popular.”
If you guys are making a skatepark in Washington u should make it indoors or with something covering it from the rain other wise they are useless most of the year because its really annoying having all this great skateparks that we can only use part of the summer and the other 9 months we cant.
Skateboarding is a craft that brings humans from all walks of life together. Skateboarding builds confidence, and honors dedication with the reward of progression. Skateboarding is a community builder. I see Seattle skateparks being used every single dry day, unlike some ball fields or tennis courts. It is a growing movement, and if you ignore it you will become ever more confused and disgruntled.
I am 28 and skateboarding has been an amazingly positive influence in my life. Thank you Seattle for offering your residents a place to hone their craft and discover their unique gifts and feel the joy of riding on a board. Skateboarding is freedom. Skateboarding is love.