Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

One mayoral candidate ran on a promise to tear the rusting towers down; instead they became one of the most influential park designs of the twentieth century. Gas Works Park, at 2101 North Northlake Way on a promontory jutting into Lake Union, preserves the remnants of the last coal gasification plant in the United States - and turned a toxic industrial ruin into Seattle's most distinctive public space. The Seattle Gas Light Company plant manufactured the city's gas from 1906 to 1956, first from coal and later oil, leaving behind contaminated soil and a skyline of blackened towers directly across the water from downtown. The city bought the site in 1962 expecting to erase it. Landscape architect Richard Haag proposed the opposite: keep the relics, celebrate the industrial past, and clean the ground with a then-novel technique - bioremediation, using oxygen and organic matter to activate the soil's own microbes. Public opinion swung to Haag's side, the council approved his masterplan in 1972, and the park opened fully in the mid-1970s. The 20-acre design won the American Society of Landscape Architects' President's Award and is cited worldwide as the precedent for postindustrial parks; it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Today the cracking towers stand fenced as monumental sculpture while the former exhauster-compressor building serves as a play barn, its machinery painted and touchable. The Great Mound - Kite Hill - built from excavated fill, gives the best panorama of the Seattle skyline anywhere in the city, with seaplanes landing on Lake Union in the foreground. The park anchors the Burke-Gilman Trail and hosts Fourth of July crowds by the tens of thousands. Practical notes: parking is a small lot off Northlake Way that fills fast on sunny days - cycling or the trail is the better approach - and swimming is prohibited offshore. Sunset from Kite Hill is the essential Seattle experience it was designed to be.