After a half-century of being piped underground, part of the once-proud springwater creek that gave Ravenna Park its name will finally see...
After a half-century of being piped underground, part of the once-proud springwater creek that gave Ravenna Park its name will finally see the light of day again.
Members of the Ravenna Creek Alliance celebrated a groundbreaking yesterday for the Ravenna Creek Daylighting Project, 15 years after they started lobbying county and city officials. Construction is set to begin Tuesday.
When completed in spring 2006, about 800 more feet of the creek will be daylighted, or returned to a more natural, above-ground state.
“I’m celebrating. The Ravenna Creek Alliance has just thrown a party,” President Kit O’Neill said. “We’ve thrown longer parties, but never a better one.”
Long the victim of urbanization, Ravenna Creek once carried water from Green Lake to Lake Washington. The creek was cut off in 1911 when Green Lake was lowered 7 feet and separated from Lake Washington in the 1950s and 1960s when it was piped into the county sewage system to accommodate development.
Only 3,500 feet of the original creek remains, confined to Ravenna and Cowen parks.
“The ultimate insult was dumping the creek into the sewer system,” said alliance organizer Peggy Gaynor. “They were digging this huge trench and thought, ‘Well, let’s just drop the creek in here.’ It’s just what they did in those days.”
The 800 feet of creek to be daylighted will begin where the creek now goes underground and will run along a baseball diamond in the southeast corner of the park.
The stream will end at a “funnel” designed by a San Francisco artist, Mark Breast van Kempen, where it will spill into a new pipeline that King County completed last February. The milelong pipe runs under the sidewalk along Northeast 54th Street, down Ravenna Place Northeast, then along 25th Avenue Northeast to Northeast 45th Street, where the creek will flow into University Slough and into Union Bay and Lake Washington, as nature intended.
In addition to the park “funnel,” other public art by Breast van Kempen will line 25th Avenue Northeast, including a blue line marking the route of the underground pipe, with three windows into it, to show pedestrians the stream.
The $1.8 million project is mainly funded by the county.
This has been years in the making. In 2002, the community was divided over daylighting plans that called for getting rid of the baseball diamond.
The disagreement pitted neighbor against neighbor. Perhaps no one felt that more than Jef Jaisun, a member of the alliance and an avid user of the baseball diamond.
“I was between a rock and a hard place. It was really contentious back then,” Jaisun recalled yesterday.
Eventually, there was a compromise and the daylighting plans were scaled back to accommodate both the creek and the diamond.
“Now it will benefit everyone and remain a multiuse area,” Jaisun said.
Lisa Chiu: 206-464-2349 or lchiu@seattletimes.com