Hey Little Screens of Salish Sea Country – all you millennials and younger – heads up. Boomers and even my cohort Gen X’ers didn’t listen, so this truth’s for you: a dead white guy named Doc Maynard just changed your life. How? His ideological heirs recently approved developing your forested sanctuary and “Soul of the Eastside” – Kenmore’s Saint Edward State Park. They held meetings — you didn’t show — so they decided this part of your future for you and your grandkids.
Commissioners voted to turn the peaceful seminary campus into a hotel/spa with new parking lots, additions, and potential roads, via a 60-year lease, despite exploding sprawl. Old-school boosterism drove them, its spirit straight from this Maynard dude — early Seattle’s most functional drunk and tireless promoter, who pushed the tide-flat town’s growth to conjure the Chinook Jargon joke into reality, to grow like New York, “Alki” – by and by.
Look around: Maynard’s won. Jobs from fishing and timber, port trade and gold rush booms, to airplanes and medical research, computers, online shopping and now your magical phones engorged a metropolis from beach to foothills. You like endless pavement? Fine, enjoy, it’s mostly private property. Public property’s different. Our parks hold fast against the urban tsunami. In 1977, the Catholic Church conveyed its lake-front acreage to us as a park. For nearly forty years, ranger housing, small group rental and weddings harmonized with our paramount reverence for passive outdoor recreation – hiking, picnicking, swimming, playing on grass-blessed fields.
But boosterism couldn’t take it. Boosters saw bucks instead of balance at St. Ed’s. Park friends stopped plans for a giant sleepover bar and landmarked the park, and later stopped developers from swapping adjacent acreage for the campus’ total ownership. New state law forced study of non-profit options. Then developers came back offering the generational lease, adjacent acreage, and a non-profit room. Boosterism bought it: after all, the privileged need more pampering choices. A rigged process rejected greener, cheaper, nonprofit uses that over 3,000 e-petitioners supported: an open-air monument, partial daylighting and environmental education programs to serve low-income families. Boosters said parks must profit, we can’t fund both parks and schools. The private hotel won.
I’ll tell you Little Screens – we used to fund both parks and schools, without use fees, massive levies and glitzy auctions. We don’t have to commercialize parks or trade them for education. We can hash it out and get it done. But you guys need to do it. You need to show up in person. Decide your future yourselves.
Listen to another voice: Maynard’s friend Chief Sealth of the Duwamish and Suquamish Nations. White people have long exploited Sealth’s words, but his power must live in this rendering: “Every part of this land is sacred to my people.”
Native Americans fight today for that sacredness and theirlawful rights. Heed them and Sealth, not the boosters. Don’t be New York by and by. Be the Seattle that values nature, now. There’s still some left to save.
Joseph Marshall, Kenmore
