Nagle Place
It is not known what progress the Seattle Police Department has made identifying suspects or a motive in the shooting deaths of brothers Ray and TT Wilford but the murders have brought new urgency to a Capitol HIll community group’s efforts to address safety and worries about drug dealing on the west side of Cal Anderson Park.
The Cal Anderson Park Alliance was already in the midst of a survey process to collect feedback about Nagle Place, the street that runs along the west edge of the park that has been given over mostly to parking and street disorder despite nearby development rising above it, when the latest shootings happened.
“For years, it’s been obvious that much of the violence in the park is related to the drug market on Nagle and the west edge of the park,” the CAPA group said in a statement to CHS in the wake of the deadly Saturday night that left 33-year-old and 29-year-old brothers dead.
CHS reported here on the identification of the Wilford brothers and the few details SPD has made public about the April 29th homicides. Those murders followed an August 2022 shooting that left a basketball player dead after a late night argument on the court. The summer before in 2021, a pickup game ended in a shooting when police said a player was attacked over a wager involving a “significant amount of cash.” In spring of 2019, 21-year-old Hakeem Salahud-din was gunned down on the court where a group had started fighting after Salahud-din’s sister was punched in the face.
(Image: CHS)
The Cal Anderson Park Alliance says in the wake of the latest murders it has been working with the city for the past year on strategies “to increase positive activity and safety in the park through responsive maintenance, planned events, and infrastructure changes.”
“Some of those strategies have been implemented, including tree lighting and tree trimming for sightlines, removal of outdated fencing around the pumphouse, and working to keep the bathrooms functional,” the group says.
But CAPA says urgent work must be done to make “more substantive changes” — part of that will be changes to the sports courts near the Bobby Morris turf playfield where crowds gather to skateboard and play basketball.
CAPA says it it working with the city on a plan for “realigning and renovating” the court areas.
Officials are also planning to restrict illegal parking near the Seattle Public Utilities pumphouse next to the basketball court, CAPA says.
CHS reported a year ago here in May 2022 on community discussions that had grown out of the response to the 2020 CHOP occupied protest and efforts to restore and improve Cal Anderson.
Following CHOP as pandemic restrictions were still in place and areas of the park fell into disrepair, a letter from area businesses and community groups warned Seattle City Hall of a “spiraling public health and public safety crisis” in Cal Anderson. Early discussions of efforts to “memorialize CHOP” and boost community mutual aid efforts have mostly gone quiet since.
Take the Cal Anderson Park Alliance Nagle Place survey here.
But CAPA hopes more changes can be made beyond infrastructure.
“[R]ealistically, we know that infrastructure changes and activation won’t be enough to remove the drug market from Nagle,” the group says in its statement to CHS. “CAPA has called on the City to act with greater urgency to implement the measures we’ve identified together, to provide a strategy on Nagle to disrupt the drug market, and to find additional solutions to help us ensure that the park and the surrounding area are safe, welcoming spaces for all members of our community.”
CAPA wants the investments in overhauling this part of Cal Anderson to include a plan for “activating Nagle and the park” and to reopen the park’s shelter house structure for “community use.”
Other, citywide initiatives will also come into play. Mayor Bruce Harrell‘s push to increase the number of Park Rangers in the city will only be a daytime factor but his administration’s focus on a crackdown on public drug use and drug markets as part of downtown revitalization could also mean increased efforts from local and federal law enforcement around Cal Anderson.
Nagle Place, meanwhile, remains far from visions put forward during the construction of the nearby Capitol Hill light rail station to better integrate the street with the park, the transit facility, and surrounding development.
You can participate in the Cal Anderson Park Alliance Nagle Place survey here.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
🌈🐣🌼🌷🌱🌳🌾🍀🍃🦔🐇🐝🐑🌞🌻
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 👍
In the wake of CHOP/CHAZ people with zero history in the neighborhood literally took over the park and demanded it revolve around BLM, black trans women, mutual aid, and a slew of other things that nobody else who have been part of the park for decades was given a say in. Ironically, there were teachings during these protests about colonialization and gentrification. At the exact same time (and often the exact same people) were colonizing our neighborhood and demanding that it changed to suit them and their ideological pursuits with zero regard to people who actually lived in the neighborhood and use the park. The irony probably goes over a lot of people’s heads.
Lol “colonizing our neighborhood”. It’s ours not yours. Your voice does not speak for all. Also this land isn’t ours either. Time to educate yourself before speaking.
Technically, everything is borrowed. While we’re all here though, on this rock hurtling through space (as if that weren’t terrifying enough) it would seem we’re compelled to shoot starve maim torture bully traffick and hate each other on the short list so I don’t see how having a shitty attitude is helping.
I think a lot of people DID realize that and left when it became clear the white people and tankies were strong arming people of color and other competent voices out.
Wow! You really had to stretch definitions until they cracked and jump through hoops to get to your presuppositional “irony”. I admire your contortionism. The blind, privileged attitude you bring to this is where the real irony resides.
Haha wow I knew before I came down here that the first comment would be some tone-deaf CHOP thing. that progressives have “colonized” the park and this is implicitly contributing to the crime problem is a way more wild take than I was expecting.
“People who actually lived in the neighborhood and use the park” remember that Nagle has been shady for a long time and that the whole park has had its shady moments that the city eventually responds to. Remember when the whole thing was dark?
East precinct has been across the street the whole damn time though. They rousted me and my friends once for chilling on the field late – drove right up. Maybe they should drive through Nagle once in a while.
Some of the other cities I have lived in had issues at parks and tennis/basketball/skate courts. They improved lighting, closed the courts down by police locking gates at ten or 11 and asked crowds to leave. Crime improved. Would that work here I don’t know but I’ve seen it help. Additionally, community members would organize “positive loitering” to deter would be bad actors from congregating. Would that always work? Maybe not but no matter what the status quo will continue to see issues in that area.
is “positive loitering” corporate speak for “hanging out in the park”? feels like you’re inventing bizarre new phrases to describe the totally normal activity of just being in a public space.
doesn’t mean you’re wrong though.
I imagine you mean crime moved. I don’t see how that helps unless it’s just “out of sight, out of mind”.
Yes… “crimes being out of sight”, what a horror for local residents! We should learn to enjoy seeing people getting mugged or shot in the heads everyday.
Oh, so hard drug abuse and addiction isn’t a victimless crime? Well I’ll be…
Statistics prove ethanol use and addiction is the most dangerous for a community, so anyone drinking a beer in the park is engaging in the “hardest” drug around, and it’s effects obviously top the heap of crimes against innocent “victims”. Sorry, but what you demonize as “hard” creates less “danger” than legal substance abuse all around us. If you need to feel anxious, stay away until survivors of addiction have alternatives in life. Yes, “we’ll be.”.
I live in Mexico and I’d love for you to visit and explain to the people living in small towns under cartel rule or had family member disappeared, land stolen, etc your little theory.
Hard drug abuse effects A LOT more people than the user.
One easy improvement: remove the godforsaken “picnic table” near the pumphouse. Nobody uses it for recreational visits.
There could be plenty of value from tables and seating, but not in a poorly-lit area that sees little foot traffic. Get rid of it.
Demonizing addicts and not understanding that they, too, need welcoming spaces as “members of our community “is counter productive . Not all violence comes from drug transaction, but lumping everyone suffering from disease as “dangerous “ is dangerous in itself. Until self medicating is legalized, our suffering neighbors or we, ourselves, numbing out in our ways, have to procure medical assistance somewhere. Like it or not, addiction is not a moral failing, but this complete lack of moral imagination IS.
What a bunch of nonsense.
the article give space and voice to CAPA and implicates the people who hang out around the courts as criminals. Is it too scary to actually interview some of the people who regularly hang out in the park to hear from them?
So far the crackdown on public drug markets has been pretty laughable thus far… The market in Little Siagon just moved around the corner and is already spilling back into some of its original territory.
Playing whack a mole with the drug markets is continuing the failed encampment sweep policies of doing surface level work on the outcome without addressing why so many people are in that situation in the first place. If we really want to help end drug addiction and markets we need to treat it like the public health crisis it is.
The tribute graffiti to the two men that lost their lives shows the six pointed star of the Gangster Disciples, as well as the 8 ball associated with the Seattle gang Duece Eight. Everyone that died at CHOP also had some form of gang affiliation. Gangs are a problem.
just wanted to point out that in the article you talk about shootings being a result of the “drug market”. then go on to give examples of the past shootings the majority of which were a result of basketball gambling, not drugs. Maybe have security for the park but it is obvious that drugs are not the problem. Stop making drugs and people with a dependency on them the scape goat for every issue. The stigma associated with drug use and people with substance use disorder is out of control. We are all human and deserve that respect. Quit blaming a population that can’t defend themselves and come up with real solutions to these problems.