A ribbon-cutting ceremony, a lion dance performance and activities for kids marked last July’s highly anticipated opening of Hoa Mai Park, built on a former parking lot in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood.
Last week — eight months after it opened — Seattle Parks and Recreation temporarily closed the park and fenced it off due to public safety concerns.
Named after a yellow flower that signifies luck and renewal in Vietnamese culture, the park was a decade in the making and provides the only public space in the roughly eight-block neighborhood that’s on the east end of the Chinatown International District.
“Activated with new art installations, a play area for youth and accessible gathering spaces for events, the new Hoa Mai Park will help foster stronger community connections in the heart of our cherished Little Saigon neighborhood,” Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell was quoted as saying last summer.
Residents and business owners say the park was quickly overrun by people experiencing homelessness and using fentanyl, making it a place families and others in the neighborhood actively avoided.
“A month after it opened, the transients got real comfortable in there. It became their park,” said David Tran, whose family owns Lam’s Seafood Asian Market across the street from the park’s South King Street entrance.
Tran said people often slept overnight in the park, where the west wall is covered in graffiti and trash regularly piled up. On a recent Thursday, a rat was seen scuttling along the concrete.
The park’s entrances on South King Street and South Jackson Street were barred March 4 with overlapping chain-link fencing. Workers on Tuesday installed sliding gates that can lock across the South King Street entrance and said they were going to return to install gates on South Jackson Street.
The 0.27-acre park, located between 12th Avenue South and Rainier Avenue South, will reopen once the work is complete.
The park was originally open daily between 4:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. Once it reopens, it will be open from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., a Seattle Parks spokesperson said by email. Those hours will be in effect until at least May 10.
“These adjusted hours are to support safety in the park,” the spokesperson said.
To change the hours in the future, Seattle Parks and Recreation will need to hold a public hearing and get approval from its board of commissioners.
It’s not the first time the city has closed a public park because of illegal activity.
In 2021, City Hall Park next to the King County Courthouse was closed and didn’t reopen for nearly two years. The pocket of downtown green space was closed in response to a fatal stabbing, a string of violent assaults and complaints about drug activity in an encampment at the site.