(Image: CHS)

There wasn’t much left of the Capitol Hill Pac-Man pavement park but the arcade game-themed paint job. Thanks to neighboring pot shop The Reef, it won’t be game over for a public space that — despite the rarity of open space in this densely packed part of the Hill — was on its way to being returned to street parking

Friday, the marijuana retailer unveiled its makeover of the E Olive Way at Summit at Denny pocket park complete with concrete ping-pong tables, corn hole fixtures, park-grade tables, chairs, and lighting. There’s room for food trucks. And the shop says it plans to sponsor future live music performances and art installations in the park.

The new partnership is said to be a first for Seattle after its pavement park program fell by the wayside in recent city budgets.

The Reef co-owner Adam Simon said the shop acted because it wanted to keep the space available to the neighborhood and do what it could to create an active area with room to hang out and enjoy a food truck in these COVID-19-cramped times.

CHS reported here in 2018 on the challenges the space faced after its first year as Seattle Parks furniture disappeared and the area was little used except for camping.

The Pac-Man park took shape in 2017 and replaced street parking spaces, an old bike share station, and a small through street that was a dangerous problem at the busy intersection, according to SDOT. The space was given a fun paint job, some plastic bollards, and planters to help buffer it from the rush of nearby traffic. The Summit project was one of a handful of $70,000 Pavement to Parks projects across the city. The plan was to evaluate the spaces after a couple of years.

The city’s takeaway was that it needed help. The Reef opened across Denny from the park in the summer of 2018.  “Upon opening its doors in August of 2018 directly across from Arcade Plaza,

he Reef recognized the potential for the space to be something more valuable to the community,” the shop’s announcement of the new initiative reads. “Now, in a first of its kind partnership, The Reef is piloting a private–public partnership in which the city has granted permits allowing The Reef to activate and steward the park, entirely at its own investment.”

The park project for The Reef comes as it prepares to face new competition down the street where a new Uncle Ike’s E Olive Way is nearly ready to open.

For Friday night”s unveiling, The Reef had the Li’l Woody’s food truck at the space and a cardboard box full of branded ping pong balls. The tables and cornhole games are extremely heavy and, The Reef hopes, hard to walk away with. The planters are also hefty and will need help keeping the plantings watered if neighbors want to lend a hand. The only herb growing, by the way, is lavender. If you get hungry, Carmelo’s Tacos is also on the edge of the 3,000-square-foot park.

Meanwhile, despite it being legal to purchase recreational marijuana across the state, it remains against the law to smoke the drug in public. In Seattle, violators could be subject to a $27 fine — even in Pac-Man park.

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