Gimme a Sign

It stood at the corner of 37th and Edmonds for two years after the Land Use Action it Proposed had been accomplished: the installation of a half-dozen portables at Columbia School. (Four hundred and twenty New School students needed a place to learn while their new building at Rainier Beach was under construction, and the Columbia building couldn't hold them all. So the District brought in six clunky boxes, propped them up on cinderblocks, and strung them together with some haphazard wires.) To those of us who walked by with any frequency, the sign was a continual & painful reminder of the six pine trees that were sacrificed to give these portables room during their two year stint.

Now, we know the District was in a bind (they always are, somehow -- and I don't mean that in a snarky way). They had to fit the New Schoolers somewhere, and this must have been the least crappy among a dismal array of inadequate options. (Like starting all the elementary schools at 9:45 in order to eliminate half the bus drivers. Or laying off 172 teachers in the face of a $34 million budget deficit.) And really, given the number of serious challenges & outright disasters facing the Seattle Public Schools, the fate of six pine trees can't be expected to rise to the top of their list of things to care about.

Those six pine trees meant something to some of us, though. I was told they were donated by SDOT twenty years ago, in the early days of the Orca Garden, and relocated here at great expense, as they were already fairly big even back then. I've also heard that the little grove was a memorial to a former Orca student who died falling down a stairwell. Whatever their origins, they formed a lovely, if narrow, contemplative space at the northern edge of the Garden, with a little semi-circle of stump stools arrayed in their shade. I sat there many times over the years -- with shy children sharing their poetry, with sullen children who had tired of the sundial lesson, with adults in crisis trying to find a way through. And so on the day the big machines appeared and made matchwood of this line of trees, I was a little traumatized.


As the New School's tenure at Columbia School drew to a close this spring, the sagging, defunct sign became increasingly exasperating. Now it was a reminder not only of the missing trees, but of the unbearable uncertainty many of us felt about the future of the site. What would become of Columbia School when the New School left? Neighbors, businesses, alumni, local nonprofits -- everyone wanted to know! But the District, in the throes of another round of school closures, was not in the mood to talk to a bunch of meddling, opinionated neighbors about something it hadn't even begun to contemplate.

So questions abounded, and rumors ran wild. Would they sell the property, or hang on to it in case they needed to put a school there again someday? Would they relocate some other program there? Could the Farmers Market find a home on the playground? Would they turn it over to Zion Prep, a nearby private school that was looking to relocate? Would they lease it out to artists or community groups? Would they board it up and let it rot? No answers were forthcoming. And yet, this outdated sign still stood there, mocking our curiosity and concern, spotlighting the utter lack, in fact, of any Proposed Land Use Action at all.

A couple of weeks ago some concerned citizens hatched a plan to appropriate the sign and put it to work as a creatively maladjusted response to the District's stonewalling. These citizens would don orange vests and carry clipboards to give ourselves -- themselves, I mean -- an air of authority. We -- er, they, that is -- would march over in broad daylight, set up orange cones around the sign, and paint their own message on the 4' x 8' plywood. They -- oh, all right, we -- began to discuss various concepts for the piece, ranging from eye-popping-psychedelia to faux-official.

We began to narrow in on the idea that the sign should present an alternate vision for the site, and for the decision-making around it. Our Proposed Land Use Action would be driven by the community, not overworked & defensive bureaucrats. It might include housing along the western edge, retail on the east side, space for the Farmers Market, maybe an extension of Columbia Park -- and a refurbished Columbia School at the heart of it all, bustling with artists, or activists, or something we have yet to imagine. And at the bottom it would have the phone number for the District's Facilities Manager, and maybe an e-mail for our little band of neighborhood rabble-rousers. I went by to take a picture of the sign so we could make ours look as official as possible. And discovered, to my complete surprise, that it was -- finally -- gone.


We couldn't believe this could possibly be a coincidence -- the sign vanishes after two years, on the very day that we'd finally figured out exactly how to turn it into a tool for the revolution? We suspected that our cell had been infiltrated by SPS informants, but we had no proof -- until the next day, when I spotted this scene on my way out of the Whitworth building, half a mile south:


That's right -- they were so determined to keep it out of our hands, they decided to bury it.

(Well, not really. They said they were planning to use it to cover up the hole they were digging to fix a broken pipe. We just checked, and it's still there now. Anyone feeling mischievous?)