Gas Works Park and the skyline
— the rusted bones, the city behind.
Not only on a wall.
“The old gas plant on the north shore of Lake Union. Richard Haag kept the towers when the park opened in 1975, painted them dark, and let the grass grow up around them. The hill at the back of the park is where everyone climbs for the skyline view, kite strings going up while the seaplanes come down. On a clear evening the rust catches the same light the buildings across the water do. The park stays open until eleven.
Gas Works Park and the skyline, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gas Works Park sits on the north shore of Lake Union in Seattle, on a roughly 19-acre peninsula in the Wallingford neighborhood. The site once held the Seattle Gas Light Company's coal gasification plant, which ran from 1906 to 1956. Landscape architect Richard Haag persuaded the city to keep the towers rather than demolish them, and the park opened to the public in 1975. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. The Burke-Gilman Trail runs along its southern edge. From the top of Kite Hill, the downtown Seattle skyline reads across the lake, with the Space Needle to the west and the Aurora Bridge to the south.
The towers are the remnants of the boiler house and exhauster-compressor building, kept by Haag as sculpture when the city briefly considered tearing them down. The exhauster-compressor building, painted a deep weathered colour, shelters a covered play barn and a picnic area beneath the iron. The smaller cracking towers stand fenced for safety. Soil on the site was capped after the gas-plant residues were stabilised. The Wading and Picnic Sundial, set on the southern slope by the artists Charles Greening and Kim Lazare in 1978, points back at the city across the water. The whole composition reads as a quiet argument for keeping the past in plain sight rather than scraping the ground clean.
The park is open daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., reached by car off N. Northlake Way or by bicycle on the Burke-Gilman Trail. There is no admission fee. The interior of the cracking towers is fenced and closed to the public; only the play barn under the exhauster-compressor building is open to walk through. Kite Hill is a short climb above the lake and the favourite vantage for the city's Seafair Fourth of July fireworks, which launch from a barge on Lake Union. Parking fills early on summer weekends. The lake side of the park has no fence; small children and the seaplane channel need minding.