The community group working with the City of Seattle and the firm designing the new park at Federal and Republican is ready to share the design concept they’ve cooked up at a neighborhood meeting and movie night in the future park space Thursday night.

Here’s the invite from one of the organizers for the group, Norah Kates:

I look forward to seeing all of you this Thursday, August 4th, for our final public meeting that will roughly conclude this schematic design phase of the park’s development. If you’ve been following the progress of the park, are on this listserve, and/or are at all interested in the outcome of the space, I hope you can make it to the meeting, where the landscape architects we’ve hired with the grant money will present their final schematic design, explain its features and their general concept, get our feedback, and talk about the next steps moving forward. This project has a ways still to go, but we have come a long way so far, and this is a great milestone! I have been really impressed with the architects and am excited to see their final product. Thanks so much everyone for all your work getting us here.

To celebrate, we’ll follow the meeting with a movie in the park! Bring a blanket, some popcorn, and we’ll watch The Man Who Planted Trees, followed by some short clips as well. Things will get started as soon as it’s dark, and the full program will run about an hour.

6:30 – Public Meeting #3: Presentation of Final Schematic Design
9:30ish – The Man Who Planted Trees

See you there!
Norah

The design proposal includes a northern strip of p-patch and community garden space and a series of benches and “coffee table” installations along the eastern retaining wall of the park lot. You’ll recall that eastern part of the park will abut a new apartment development being planned for 11th and Republican. The design also includes a sequence of “seat steps & mow bands” on the lot’s slope leading to a large lawn and a wall and bench area that includes game tables. CHS’s proposal for a big screen monitor flashing the latest capitolhillseattle.com headlines was, apparently, a last minute cut from the final proposal.

Also note: There are no plans for a skate dot.

The designer for the project is Seattle architect firm Site Workshop. You can check out their previous park and open space work here. Site Workshop worked with feedback collected at a community meeting in May to arrive at the final design proposal to be presented Thursday night.

In the meantime, Kates and the Friends of FedRep group have their work cut out for them on the fundraising front. While the city was able to pony up $2 million to acquire the park land thanks to levy money, it was not able to fund construction of the park. So far, the park has already won one city grant for $20,000 and a contest sponsored by Umpqua Bank for another (up to) $10,000 in support. If you’d like to help the group raise funds through matching grants, etc. check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FedRepPark