People with backpacks and one with a cart of clothing in a beige shopping cart hang around the Clark Park gazebo the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 2.
Photo by Michael Whitney.
EVERETT — The city’s Historical Commission held off granting the city government a certificate authorizing the alteration of Clark Park to remove its historic gazebo, a request the volunteer body already found unappealing.
Instead, at its April 23 meeting, it voted 6-0 to postpone making a decision indefinitely and wrote a letter to the city telling it to seek a waiver.
A waiver is a more exacting approval that requires the City Council’s sign-off to allow demolition at any place on the city’s historic register.
The Historical Commission is involved because the entire Clark Park was added to Everett’s Register of Historic Places in 1993.
The city wants to install an off-leash fenced dog park on part of the park that includes where the gazebo’s currently standing.
The commission would rather see the city present alternatives that preserve the gazebo that’s been in the park since 1921.
“The purpose of the Everett Register is to encourage preservation of our heritage. Demolitions or radical alterations of Everett Register properties are contrary to this goal,” the letter drafted by chair Patrick Hall reads. Removing the gazebo for the dog park “is not a compelling enough reason for such radical action.”
The city’s reasoning to remove the gazebo is because crime has disproportionately happened around the gazebo. Removing it will likely reduce criminal activity in the park, city planning director Yorik Stevens-Wajda said.
Chris Moore, the head of the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, said he disagrees crime issues are a reason to remove the gazebo.
“You don’t remove a historical resource because it has a ‘component’ to it that is fixable or addressable in other ways,” Moore said, noting that “once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Moore said the presence of dogs and people at the dog park should reduce criminal activity.
Some historical commissioners have suggested to wait-and-see if the dog park lowers crime as well.
The parks department pivoted to removing the gazebo after it found adding security features to the gazebo could cost up to $400,000. City parks director Bob Leonard said previously he didn’t feel comfortable asking city leaders to fund that amount to renovate the gazebo.
Leonard told the commission last week that “we feel having the gazebo in the dog park would still have challenges” with crime.
The city is proposing it may possibly dismantle it to put in storage, like it did with Clark Park’s cannon that hasn’t re-appeared since. The parks department could place remembrance measures such as a rock with a monument on the site of the gazebo and to have the fence include pieces taken off of the gazebo.
City code says while the Historical Commission would decide whether to give a certificate, any final decision on the matter of whether it’s appropriate to alter a historic register property ultimately rests with the planning director, Stevens-Wajda.
Calling for a waiver instead puts the gazebo’s fate in the City Council’s hands, from the Tribune’s review of Everett's historic register codes, or may hold it up because city code outlines that having the ad hoc commission render a decision is embedded as necessary to move forward.
The City Council will have some say later when it votes on a funding package for the dog park project. The council could add funding conditions such as explicitly to not remove the gazebo, Stevens-Wajda said.
Andrea Tucker, of the nonprofit Historic Everett, implored the city to work with them to see if grant money can be sought to save the gazebo.
Tucker said they also have a petition for keeping the gazebo standing with more than 100 signatures.
The park’s historic cannon went into storage years ago, and the music bandshell was demolished in 1979. Hall said removing the gazebo would be the last remaining historical element of the park.
The local Bayside Neighborhood endorsed the gazebo’s removal.
Bayside representative Jane McClure said keeping it would cause it to be vandalized further, and repairs would add expenses to make it ADA-compliant, which it isn’t right now.
The city has bigger projects to tackle than repairing the gazebo, McClure said last week.
Although the neighborhood has concerns, Tucker said Clark Park is “a city park, not a neighborhood park,” Tucker said. “It’s for all to use.”
Resident Trygve Anderson proposed repairing the gazebo instead of casting it away. The city is already undertaking high-profile expenditures elsewhere, he said.
“It doesn’t cause drug use, it just happens to be where drug use is happening - let it live,” said Trygve Anderson, whose mother played on the gazebo as a child.
Moore said a waiver is the right process.
A “demolition is the epitome of the opposite of appropriateness” to write into a certificate of appropriateness, Moore said.
Historical Commissioners also heavily debated the city’s request to endorse a certificate at its February and March meetings.
