Cliff Cannon mini-park takes shape
The little sitting wall and pocket park on the southeast corner of 14th Avenue and Lincoln Street on Spokane’s South Hill was supposed to look different than it does – but that’s what happens when history intervenes.
The mini-park was dedicated April 25, replacing an asphalt traffic triangle. Now, according to the hopes of the Cliff Cannon Neighborhood Council, it serves as the discernible center of the neighborhood, which is loosely bounded on the north and south by the freeway and 17th Avenue, and east to west by Cowley Street and the bluff.
Judy Gardner, a member of the neighborhood council, said the tiny park grew out of a neighborhood effort begun in 2007 when Spokane gave each neighborhood $20,000 for planning. For Cliff Cannon, that process revealed priorities such as safe pedestrian corridors, traffic calming and beautification.
While there are several north-south arterials in the neighborhood that direct traffic to and from downtown, there is only one key east-west corridor – 14th Avenue – which is also the route many children walk on the way to Roosevelt Elementary, Gardner said.
“We wanted to make it more beautiful and safer,” she said, noting that the asphalt triangle at the intersection allowed vehicles to make a turn onto 14th without having to stop or hardly slow down, a hazard to the children crossing the street there.
With the help of faculty and students from WSU’s landscape and urban design program, a detailed master plan incorporating the neighborhood’s vision for improvements was created, including a pocket park designed with a trolley theme, and it was shared with city engineers. When 14th Avenue was repaved in 2013 between Lincoln Street and Grand Boulevard, city engineers agreed to give any historic brick pavers or trolley tracks that were unearthed to the neighborhood council for possible use in the park. That resulted in good news and bad news, Gardner said. The bad news – no trolley artifacts were found. The good news – a mother lode of bricks turned up.
City dump trucks deposited bricks, dirt, asphalt and pieces of concrete by Polly Judd Park near the bluff for the council. Gardner said that neighborhood volunteers – including a few residents from the Spokane Addiction Recovery Center – removed bricks from the debris, cleaned them and stacked them on pallets that were donated by the neighborhood Rosauers store, and also encased them in plastic sheeting donated by Rosauers. A neighbor with property adjacent to Polly Judd Park agreed to store the 17 pallets until the bricks would be needed.
“Please understand there were a lot of bricks – more than 3,000,” Gardner said.
They then researched the source of the bricks, which are 4-by-2-by-9-inches and wavy on the thin side, with clay buttons on the bottom. It was first thought that they came from the plant operated at nearby Cannon Hill Park in the late 1800s. But in fact they were made by Washington Brick and Lime Co. in the early 1900s, when that company moved to the downtown area, and were used in a 1910 street paving project. This information was authenticated by Spokane Preservation Advocates, which provided a Heritage Grant to the neighborhood council to help with costs for tiles, engraving and other expenses.
Happily, Gardner said, the park was included in the city’s 2014 redesign project for South Lincoln and South Monroe streets, so the neighborhood council kicked into implementation mode. But with no trolley artifacts to incorporate, the park’s historical focus and design changed to emphasize the historic bricks instead.
Gardner said members of Local 3 of the Bricklayers Union volunteered their time (and rebar and mortar) to build the 20-foot-long sitting wall, using about 1,000 of the bricks; plaques are embedded at each end providing historical information.
“There were so many volunteers on this project, I can’t name them all, but it was truly a community effort to create this little green space that also makes useful once again these bricks from Spokane’s history,” she said.
But the Cliff Cannon Neighborhood Council isn’t done yet, nor is it forgetting about the remaining 2,000 bricks.
“Oh, don’t worry, we will find worthy projects for those bricks, too,” Gardner said. “We will be giving these historic bricks a purpose so they can be appreciated for generations to come.”