The CHOP “raised fist” remained for a short time following the camp’s clearance
This May will bring the five year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota cop. June will mark five years from the Black Lives Matter protests that followed across the country and in Seattle centered around the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone and Cal Anderson.
This spring, the Seattle Parks department says it is working on a plan to create a new art installation in the popular Capitol Hill park “to commemorate the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, honor Seattle’s Black and BIPOC communities, and memorialize those lost to gun violence.”
The new project will join the nearby E Pine Black Lives Matter mural in marking the area’s place in 2020’s unrest. It follows the late 2023 removal of the Black Lives Memorial Garden from the park.
This year’s project will create a new memorial.
“This space will be co-created with input from the community, ensuring that those most impacted by the events and themes of this installation have a voice in its creation,” a park spokesperson tells CHS. “Through this collective process, we aim to provide a space for reflection, solidarity, and continued advocacy for racial justice.”
The city is working on a contract with arts group Vivid Matters Collective to “conduct community engagement, and “work with community and artists to design an installation in Cal Anderson Park.” VMC also has shepherded the long-term responsibility of maintaining the Black Lives Matter mural created on E Pine by artists and activists in 2020 in the first days of the protests in Seattle.
The collective, led by artist Takiyah Ward says it is currently in an “incubation” phase while “undergoing extreme revisions on how we operate in an evolving creative society.”
We’ve also reached out to the Cal Anderson Park Alliance community group but have not yet heard back on the project. Prior to COVID-19 and 2020’s widespread protests in response to racism and police brutality, the CAPA stewardship group had been working to seek community input to improve public safety and infrastructure in the park. Community discussions about a memorial in the immediate wake of CHOP’s clearance included efforts to address CAPA’s initiatives.
While many of the investigations and lawsuits surrounding Seattle’s protests, the flawed Seattle Police Department response to the unrest, and CHOP have wound down, other wounds remain raw.
CHS reported last month on calls by the family of Antonio Mays Jr. for Congress to probe the city’s actions five years ago and SPD’s investigation into the deadly shooting that left the young man mortally wounded in a bullet-riddled jeep on 12th Ave in the midst of a chaotic, dangerous night around Cal Anderson and the protest camp.
Named for the state’s first openly gay legislator, Cal Anderson Park opened in 2005 after being transformed from a weed-covered mess of a sports field, reservoir, and park — Lincoln Reservoir was capped and covered with Cal Anderson as part of a city parks levy project.
Anderson’s legacy expanded from the park in 2023 as the AIDS Memorial Pathway project added new art installations and connected the north end of the park to the plaza above Capitol Hill Station.
Parks says the project to add a new CHOP memorial does not yet have an established budget.
“Once we have some concepts together which will be developed with community engagement, we will work on estimates to inform the budget and apply for grants,” the city spokesperson said. “We haven’t set a budget yet because we don’t have any dedicated funding.”
“Funding will be sought in the future through grants and other opportunities,” the parks department says.
The new memorial project follows efforts last year to sort out a community-led approach to memorializing the protests and CHOP in Cal Anderson. Seattle Parks said the memorial garden created during CHOP and maintained by activists needed to be removed for a “turf restoration” project in the park’s grass bowl area that officials said was required “to host gatherings and large events.” Seattle Parks said it offered to work with the Black Star Farmers group that helped shape the initial garden and that stewarded the space over the years to relocate the garden in the park or move it to another location including a space behind the Rainier Community Center. The garden was never rebuilt.
Whatever direction the arts collective takes in leading the new community process to create a CHOP memorial, don’t expect green thumbs to be involved.
“We have shopped the idea around on several occasions over the past few years and have not heard a lot of support because of the high rate of vandalism,” the parks spokesperson said.
UPDATE: A representative for CAPA said the group was “generally supportive of the effort but not actively involved.”
The CAPA rep said they’ve met with planners to “talk about the location and physical considerations.”
“We leave it to the community to decide on the design,” the representative said. “As CAPA, our primary concerns are that it doesn’t limit the use of the spaces and that whatever is installed is durable and easily cleaned, so that it serves its purpose and is something that can be appreciated for a long time.”
CAPA plans to help city planners publicize opportunities for community engagement around the project.
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Focus on removing the criminals from the park – we can then take care of these types of memorials. They’re good, they’re useful – but until you remove the criminals and keep them off the streets (including people who occupy public parks and spaces with tents); you will go nowhere.
These memorials are not good when they are done in a biased and propagandist manner. The activist community plays hard and loose with the facts. I worry that people who were not here at that time- or in the future, too young to remember- will be exposed to self serving propoganda. Many of the groups involved with this have shown themselves to be toxic to the community. Seattle Parks and Rec is favoring a small but powerful activist collective over the larger community. What else is new.
There is no need for a gun violence memorial in the park either. Yes there have been victims of gun violence in the park. But there are areas with far more deaths due to gun violence that have no such memorial.
As someone mentioned above, why is a park dedicated to a LGBTQ leader being taken over by BLM? There are already public spaces, including parks that center black people. What would the reaction be if these parks decided to instead center white gay men? There is something very greedy about this community that demands constant centering. Read the room. It’s not all about you.
“Why is a park dedicated to a LGBTQ leader being taken over by BLM? There are already public spaces, including parks that center black people”
100% this! I have been trying to figure out this question myself. So the LGBTQ community didn’t/still don’t face struggles that we are allowing a shift in the original focus of the park, in order to memorialize a blight on neighborhood’s history.
Cal Anderson used to be my favorite park. I would ride my bike up there and sit on one of the benches in front of the reflection pool and write journal entries or poems. Now the area is such a shit show. I wish we would prioritize getting the park back to its original glory instead of wasting time and money on anything related to CHOP.
Focus on housing the houseless
And for the ones who decline help and housing so that they can do their drugs, gotta address the substance problem too
Safe injection spots or bust. No fascism.
Oh you’re fully a troll – who cannot and should not be taken seriously. Got it.
Says the old man stomping his foot about alleged criminals nobody but he notices.
Even the Nirvana (pun perhaps intended) of safe injection sites, East Hastings in Vancouver, has folks that just shoot in the street. We have to solve for that, Jacob. Those folks need to be presented with help.
Anyway, injection is passé. We need Safe Inhalation Sites. Maybe a CSR grant from Reynold’s Wrap could get it off the ground?
I don’t think CHOP is something we should be celebrating. I’ve lived on the Hill for over 20 years and have never experienced such a massive shit show in all my years living here. People were raped. Two teenagers were shot and killed, among other shootings and examples of violence. I myself was witness to one of these shooting’s as I was walking to work early one morning where I had to call 911. I was only feet away from the victim. CHOP was a huge example of mismanagement by the local police dept. They let is escalate into something that no longer represented the initial sentiment of the protest.
o
Totally agree.
Raped? What are you talking about
I’m still looking for the story, but I also recall there was a report that an older man was luring teenage girls into his tent in the CHOP zone and raping them. I believe it involved more than one girl.
Found a Stranger story with an account of an attempted rape – https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/19/43938596/chop-medic-intervened-in-a-sexual-assault-in-cal-anderson
That incident happened outside of the CHOP zone at the other side of the park
BS – just because it grew out of the control of the originators doesn’t mean that those people weren’t part of it. After a couple of days of pretending to be Woodstalk it turned right into lord of the flies.
Yeah a CHOP person saved that non-CHOP related incident, not cops. Try again.
Yes. Raped. There were reports of a rape inside the park when homeless people moved in towards the end of CHOP.
Do any of you think anything that happened at CHOP/CHAZ was unique or exceptional to just daily living in America?
Cause it seems like you do which is super buffoonish as you try to hold onto a civil society in your mind.
You can check the numbers and see the 500% crime spike in that area.
Really, I saw it was actually 600%, while my wife saw 700%
Oh shit, neighbor is claiming he saw it was 1000%.
That just proves that neither you nor your neighbor looked at the published stats, which I know because I did.
There were teenagers killed outside of CHOP too
I believed I mentioned that. Or at least that’s what I meant.
If you think that a couple random rapes that had nothing to do with the original intent of the place are worth mentioning what do you think about every Catholic church in Seattle?
A. Rapes aren’t random, as you say. B. The original intent, (which I totally agreed with) lead to the “random” rapes, shootings and subsequent deaths from said shootings. So, all in all CHOP was bullshit and should have been stopped when the protesters decided to close streets, which the mayor allowed to happen! It accomplished nothing.
David, a bunch of disheveled and unorganized ‘randoms’ that basically come together in outrage over a series of State lynchings never had a hope of accomplishing ‘something’ according to the Policy Is The Only Thing types.
Protest might be the start to congregating like minds, but they don’t actually move gears amongst politicians just by existing, and it’s this weirdly naive thing amongst first timers, and then bystanders who only ever watch them from home.
Mind, I have a way more ‘it is what it is’ attitude about a lot of this partisan shit, and I’m gonna always turn out for spicy protests and riots to administer care and picking up people off the ground, but you’re pissing up ropes acting like people shouldn’t turn out to make a fuss because it isn’t a 100% or even 50% lock to work.
Remember that if you ever find yourself out there when people like me have been disappeared.
I’m going to overlook what I fervently hope is your propensity to catastrophize and agree with you that protest is good.
Honestly, I assume some worst possible outcomes so I can glide on ‘slight better than worst’ when shit is still really really bad. It’s a way to lighten the load in crunch time, and redirect and focus anxiety.
And I don’t even think I’m being overly catastrophic on disappearances given ICE doing just that and incidents from 2020 where snatch vans were out and about and detaining protesters for a day or two to send a message.
To the matter of protesting, it is good and it’s a start to anything else that might be better, and we live in a country where despite the national narrative…no…a lot of people want everyone to pretend nothing is worth fussing about ever and any fuss weighs made weighs larger on what happens, than the goddamn things the fuss is over and The State reaction.
These people would have fought to uphold slavery, and turned in Anne Frank, so long as some notion of rightful order was maintained.
“to commemorate the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, honor Seattle’s Black and BIPOC communities, and memorialize those lost to gun violence.”
Did anyone ask those who use the park most whether they would want this? Another announcement claimed a BLM protest memorial was going to be at another park, in addition to this. And then there is a “Black legacy” park display that recently was awarded $1 million. Any reason why this park, which centered the LGBTQ community now has to center BLM? Any reason that the blatant anti-Semitism of these groups is being ignored despite a mission statement that their goal is to make the park safe and welcoming for all people? Apparently “all people” is very exclusionary.
Maybe we should have a memorial for W2O first.
C17H21NO4
So a park that was supposed to center the LGBTQ has been hijacked and is now demanding to be centered around the black community. Even though there are several parks that are already do just that.
This feels a lot like the settler colonialism, imperialism and racial supremacy that I have long heard the same communities condemn. The overwhelming amount of neighborhood does not want a BLM memorial. The overwhelming majority of the neighborhood does not want certain racial groups to be singled out for special recognition constantly.
Why are people making decisions about a public park in which the vast majority of those affected get no say? This is being forced on the neighborhood by those with an agenda that is not admirable.
lmao, Trent, when is the last time you were able to fog a mirror with your breath?
If you or anyone wants a say on what happens in Cal Anderson Park, step off your soapbox and join CAPA, be informed BEFORE it is “too late” and take effective action (e.g., call, write, meet with your city rep, a parks person, etc).
Please, stop complaining on this blog if that is your only “action.”
I seem to remember CHAZ/CHOP happening due to the increase and continuation of racial profiling and violence towards black people by the hands of the police?? I went to multiple BLM gathering there during the first week.
I agree! Keep Cal Anderson Gay!
CHOP was painful and everything about this sounds like it’s going down the wrong path
Wrong. The cops were painful and dogshit.
I gotta say, it was a transformative experience Im better for and its almost a litmus test – If it didnt shape you for the better or put benevolent purpose in your soul, odds are you were a bougie bystander who doesnt give a hoot how many are lynched so long as you are comfy
Why not enjoy the profound benefit it accorded you and bypass the mean girl judgieness about what does or does not motivate people you know nothing about?
Cause its absolutely painful to see people who have the capacity, not have the heart or guts until the horse is 2 counties over and the barn is on fire.
And just speaking to our neighborhood, the rooftop gawkers who could only think to gawk and record on their phones…like…it verged on cinematic symbolism
“odds are you were a bougie bystander who doesnt give a hoot how many are lynched so long as you are comfy”
“Hang Mike Pence” is their battle cry.
Nothing to celebrate here and I hope it wouldn’t be allowed. There are way more important events to celebrate and remember.
A park to commemorate the complete abdication of government accountability and violent crime? Urban utopia for sure.
Sorry you have black lives so much. But congrats on finding the most low effort dishonest spin
Hate*
I don’t want this shit exactly because of shit like this that already exists next to Cal where there are entire sculptures that resemble protest signs – cheap memorialization that doesn’t mean anything or speak to anything but ‘Liberals appreciate shit only decades after they hated it in real time’, like MLK, like the advancement of Queer Rights in the 80s and 90s, like every single goddamn thing that is testy but ultimately morally correct.
Every new dollar spent should be on gun violence prevention, police work solving existing shootings, and on drug related crime.
Wow, lot of noise in the comments. This is still in the planning stage and they are literally asking for your input. Go give it! My god.
For my part I will be telling them that I think a memorial of some kind would be good, because the protests and CHOP were historic; however you may feel about them, they are a notable chapter in Seattle history and we should mark them somehow. But they need to balance that with the possibility of appearing to celebrate the wrong thing, and in the wrong place — a park named for another, also important piece of history and one that predates and clearly should be prioritized over the BLM protests.
A plaque or something would be perfectly sufficient IMO. “These important, complex, interesting but also sad and disturbing events happened at this site.” Add a little context and some dates. Boom, done.
You’re not wrong but they should get a new art collective to do it rather than a group that has been invested in CHOP from day one. Going to the same few artist-activists types does not give me an impression that this is an open-ended, crowd-sourced plan.
This sounds like it’s just the parks department wanting to appease the “farmers” who planted the garden no one wanted. We don’t need or want this either.
Yes. 100%. And they have been appeased too much not too little. The farmers were given over a million dollars in taxpayer funds for a site somewhere else. Given how much of their organization is based on ideological propaganda along with their open support for murdering Jewish people, this is more than offensive. Seattle would be up in arms if some red state gave some white right-wing anti-Semites similar deference and taxpayer funds.
false equivalence.
I wanted the garden, I lent some hands to it. The nearest effing thing we have to it is pea patches with waitlists and those are atomized as shit.
Here’s an honest answer and I hope you do it.
So…If homeless people can put up tents everywhere, you should be allowed to put up gardens everywhere.
Food and shelter…Maslow, anyone? They’re the big coconuts.
You should get funders to buy several dozen XL galvanized troughs, planting soil and herbs, veg, tomatoes, etc. Then Mutual Aid tends them and people can pick from them as they need.
Community gardens in reasonably presentable containers all over the city.
🤣 I grow a garden. It’s fun and I enjoy eating a few things that are extraordinary fresh, but it’s laughable that you can even think a few, even a bunch of container gardens would do anything to truly feed people. I have about 150 sq feet and plant pretty intensively. It provides me fresh spinach enough to cook once a week or two, peas, enough for a stir fry once or twice a week, salad greens, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes abundantly when in season, two or three zucchinis a week and about 5 gallons of cooked tomatillos. And of course each of these only produces for a couple of months and requires daily watering and tending. It costs to get the vegetable starts and to fertilize regularly (you really need to when you container garden).
A bunch of scattered tubs wouldn’t produce enough to bother and would likely be quickly neglected into oblivion.
A better model is the Beacon Hill Food Forest. Lots of space and dedicated volunteers.
I mean, the ambition of growing enough to feed self and others is way out there, but the actual togetherness of working together on gardening projects is good. I work right by the Saint James garden and have even thought about lending a hand there because it’s available and right effing there, but sectarian projects aren’t for everyone.
That’s got some decent space to produce viable amounts. If a church project leaves you cold the Beacon Food Forest isn’t that far of a walk from the light rail stop. They have a bit of their own brand of woo-woo, but it’s not religious and they can always use volunteers. https://www.beaconfoodforest.org/volunteer
The only acceptable memorial should be a statue of the teenager who got murdered by CHOP security.
They have a giant mural in the street. Enough’s enough.
Fuck CHOP. It was the stupidest most counterproductive event in Seattle history. I think it actually contributed to the insurrection and the massive backlash that swept Trump back into office.
How did CHOP affect swing states’ votes? I hate how dumb people are becoming. Progressvies blamed when it’s centrist and neolibs who actually LOST. Not just prez but governorships and house/senate spots
OK OK. Anyway, I want to address your first question: How did CHOP affect swing states’ votes?
I’m personally handing you the torpedo to blow up what’s about to follow as “that’s anecdotal, man!!!” Nevertheless…
My intersection with CHOP/CHAZ was entirely third-party driven. I never visited the area. I never talked to people who were participating in the event. I got a lot of my info from the media and, weirdly, people around the world.
CHOP affected swing state votes the same way it affected my friends in London; Bangkok; Lagos; Leiter’s Ford, Indiana. All around the world, the same thing.
That same thing? The media. They framed CHOP/CHAZ for the world, and of course they did so in as many ways as their political and editorial guidelines took them. Suffice to say, Jacob — a mega-shit-ton of voters were fed a steady diet of “mayhem in our streets!” when it came to CHOP/CHAZ.
My phone rang. And rang and rang and rang. My inbox filled. My phone exploded.
“Are you safe?” “Is everything OK?” “Should you leave?”
Over and over and over again.
I’ve talked to people, Jacob, who had similar experiences. So clearly this is bigger than my encounters. How much bigger? Who knows?
I’m not claiming anything other than this: CHOP infected the consciousness of a LOT of people.
Fielding those calls and reassuring every single far flung family member, shit was still standing and I was still very much alive…because the news media said different…
Some of them literally argued with me over the phone about being here.
Say what you will, but individual and groups of partisans can’t do shit about a demos that will argue with their own flesh and blood about what their flesh and blood in the actual midst of it reports.
Yeah, people really like lynchings by The State in America, and were so cross that people took exception to it. You might act like you think State Lynchings are bad, you’re an insincere and confused dork.
NO! Just no. CHOP should go into the dustbin of history, not memorialized.
How about a statue of a cop carrying a box of office supplies outside of the east precinct with “FAFO” on the box?
To commemorate how the police thought they could beat and gas the people into submission then fled with their tails between their legs like frightened dogs.
Maybe hang pink umbrellas over Pine st. to remind people how shamefully violent our cops are towards protesters?.
Hear me out… a giant spinning neon sign that says “ACAB”? There could be a button that plays “F*ck the police” when you press it.
They should skip the extra steps and just have a plaque saying “ Seattle Parks department employees are extremely virtuous and good people.” It will give them the same warm fuzzy feeling they are craving.
I’m seeing a plaque that says:
On this site
Activists built a shitshow
Which honored Black lives so hard
That two of them ended.
Hell no with this shit.
At this site, far left activists drunk on their own power reached the pinnacle of woke performance for the world to see. It destroyed one of the most vibrant LGBTQ+, multicultural neighborhood in the country, unleashed a sustained spike in violent crime, led to the execution of a sixteen-year-old black boy at their own hands, set the civil rights movement back by 50 years, and ushered in the Trump dictatorship. Go Seattle leftists!
You hapless dorks had an entire billion dollar fund raising effort thrown off by less than 100,000 people 4 years prior to the election, got it
‘Drunk on their own power’ lmao, so all that money for more cops that the Biden admin provided mattered less than me and like two dozen other people here. I could probably take your car, clothes and house just looking at you menacingly.
you can’t lump all progressives into one bunch. Those are the few. a few dozen.
‘Reality’ is basically all about
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak“. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
CHOP was a mess and was a disaster caused by the city. We have a horrible AIDS memorial art sculpture that cost $$$$$ and you can’t even tell what it is and why its there. Taggers have been targeting it. We need to bring a better art for LGBTQ+ and AIDS. BLM has lots of space. They have the sign in the middle of the road by the park. The city needs to be focused on public safety in the park and not just putting up memorials that no one will know what it means and it costs $$$$$$$. I’m sick of waste in this city. Yet they can’t get the basic things done like public safety.
Return the park to its previous state. It’s a park; it shouldn’t be a political statement. Further, I don’t thin CHAZ/CHOP is something to commemorate. Months of mayhem, damage to a public park, murders, and uncountable other crimes.