Vandals

Vandals destroyed some of the beauty in our lovely new White Center Heights Park. In June, Starbucks donated $550,000 and massive amounts of volunteer labor for the seven-day extreme makeover of the small community park. I worked six of the seven days and feel both pride and a sense of ownership. One of the things I love most about the makeover is the inclusion of art. Now part of the art is gone.

The bare posts say it all. Don Haig, Acting Supervisor III of Park Operations for King County, told me at a meeting for Friends of Hicks Lake volunteers that the glue on the post caps didn’t set properly. The vandals pulled the beautiful glass caps off and smashed them. The caps the vandals left in place were removed by King County to prevent them from being broken, too. Ironically, security cameras scheduled to be installed before the vandalism occurred were put in place just a week after the glass caps were destroyed. Not that the cameras would have prevented the destruction, but catching and punishing the culprits might have prevented future problems.

When I volunteered for a Lakewood Park cleanup in September, Geraldine, another King County employee, told me Parks Operations plans to replace the caps with new ones made of some kind of material less likely to be broken, i.e. plastic or metal. I’m guessing the replacements will not be as beautiful as the original glass caps. So sad not everyone shares in the desire to improve our White Center community.

Some time ago, my sister and I rode on the subway during a visit to Hollywood. We sat, outraged but silent, watching a vandal use a knife to scratch a message on a window. We both wanted to stop him but were afraid—after all, he had a knife. Now, I’m asking you to do what I say, not what I did. If you see someone degrading our shared public spaces, do something. You don’t need to put yourself in danger. You probably carry a cell phone; go where you won’t be seen and call the authorities. Everyone who loves parks will thank you.

White Center

Yesterday, I played tour guide for my community. When I invited a friend from the Eastside to dinner, she confessed to being afraid to drive through White Center. She envisioned tattooed gangsters with guns standing on every street corner. She agreed to come but only if she could bring another one of our friends along for support.

I’ve been attending White Center Community Development Association meetings for several months, so I had a fair amount of knowledge about the many current and scheduled improvements I could share with my guests. I chauffeured them around the business district, pointing out the international flavor of stores like the Heng Heng Market and restaurants such as the Salvadorean Bakery, Thai Thai, Pho’ and the Moon Indian Grill. There are many more, but those are some of my personal favorites. We visited the schools, including our two newly built, beautiful elementary buildings, White Center Heights and Mount View, and our libraries and parks.

I took particular pride in showing my friends the parks where I’ve worked as a steward planting and maintaining native plants. One of "my" parks, White Center Heights, is scheduled for a $550,000 renovation by the Starbucks Neighborhood Parks Program. The makeover is scheduled in June to take place over seven days using volunteer labor. Guess who’s going to be one of those volunteers?

My guests were suitably impressed with the neighborhood and enthused most satisfactorily at each site. The friend who’s a real estate agent was especially interested in Greenbridge, a mixed-income development of one hundred acres that potentially will house 3,500 people in 1,000 homes. The photo is from the King County Housing Authority Web site. I appreciated my guests’ interest, but what was most rewarding was by the end of the evening my friend decided she could visit me in the future with having someone along to ride shotgun.