Robert Stephens Jr., second from left, joined in the ceremonial groundbreaking last week

With a planned $9.5 million in city, state, and National Parks funding, Seattle officials and community leaders celebrated the groundbreaking of the Garfield Super Block, hoped to reimagine the area around Garfield High School and the community center to create a Legacy and Promise Promenade with a .34-mile loop path and new community spaces including a new play area and parkour park, new sports courts, and a central plaza.

“The community has been fighting for this project for over twenty years,” Robert Stephens, Jr. of the Garfield Super Block Coalition said. “The timeline of Seattle’s Central Area was brilliantly memorialized on the walls of Garfield High School. We wanted to bring that story to life in the art of Garfield Super Block. From the annual MLK march to historic organizing by the Black Panthers, Garfield has and always will be a central convening area for celebration and organizing with the young people of our city.”

The coalition has kept the push for the neighborhood investments alive. They first took shape twenty years ago. As part of the public process to approve building the new Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center, Seattle Public Schools had to be approved for a variance in order to build fewer than the required number of off-street parking stalls. As part of that process, the district was required to provide public benefits as a mitigation.

That project took shape as the Super Block improvement project but the effort got pushed aside by the district and the city.

“The community was just forgotten about,” Stephens told CHS in 2021.

The community’s push and funding efforts from Teresa Mosqueda, Kshama Sawant, and later current District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth helped turn the plans into action to start the transformation of the area Stephens describes as the Central District’s “little city hall.”

Funding for the effort is “a public and private effort,” the city says, with major funds from the City of Seattle & Seattle Park District ($2.83 million), the National Park Service and Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office ($2.245 million), the Washington State Department of Commerce ($2.95 Million), King County ($1 million), and Seattle Public Schools ($500,000).

The new paths, plaza, and restroom facility will feature art hoped to reflect the history and cultures of the Central District including pieces representing residents including the Duwamish, Jewish, African-American, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Italian communities that have helped shape the neighborhood. An eight piece will be a collaborative work from all seven groups.

The art will join the Legacy and Promise Promenade, a pathway fulfilling a long-envisioned goal of connecting Horace Mann School, now home to Nova High School, just on the other side of Cherry, with the Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center in the center of the Garfield High School campus.

The city says budget limitations will determine possible additional improvements including a “nature play pocket,” a climate adaptive garden, as well as updated plantings and site lighting. Depending on the contractor’s bids for construction, the project could add a covered picnic shelter, parkour park and park furnishings, Seattle Parks says.

There will also be maintenance and upgrades to existing resources. The parks department says playfield “G1” n the southwest corner will undergo replacement of its existing synthetic turf during the process.

Meanwhile, a planned parkour park would be the first of its kind in the city. In the meantime, Parkour Visions is hosting free learning sessions at the community center this summer.

Following Wednesday’s groundbreaking ceremony, Seattle Parks says construction will begin in summer 2025 with completion expected in spring 2026.

Learn more about the Garfield Super Block construction project here.

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