Seattle Parks quietly moved ahead this week with a plan to create a “nude zone” In Denny Blaine Park with new signs and fencing. Thursday night, somebody tried to rip that nude zone fence down.
Seattle Police were called to the park on the shores of Lake Washington just before 10 PM to a report from a nearby resident that someone was trying to rip down the just-installed fencing. Cops were looking for the suspect described as a male wearing a green shirt, black shorts, and a backpack last seen leaving the area on foot but it is not clear if they ever tracked the suspect down.
The surprisingly fast turnaround on the project to install the new signs and fencing happened quickly this week as the city responds to a court order to address sex and drug crime around the park reported by neighboring property and area residents while, city officials say, also attempting to respect the beach’s place in Seattle’s queer and nudist communities.
CHS reported here on the Seattle Parks Department dusting off its long-proposed plan to split the park into two zones hoped to push legal nudity away from the entrance to the public space and away from the view of neighbors who allege the park is a magnet for drug and sex crimes.
A group representing the anonymous neighbors has sued the city over the popular nude beach, demanding the park be closed to the public.
The fencing and the signs are the latest efforts by the city to calm neighbors. CHS reported in December 2023 as the parks department backed off a plan championed by Mayor Bruce Harrell to add the children’s play area paid for by an anonymous donor — later revealed to be Seattle real estate developer Stuart Sloan — amid massive public outcry.
Community group Friends of Denny Blaine that has been working on solutions to the issues around the park, its place in queer and nude culture, and the wealthy surrounding neighborhood has proposed a plan that focuses on park rangers and new signs to keep Denny Blaine open — and nude.
Many who visit and love the park as it is and as it has been say they will continue to make Denny Blaine their space no matter what signs go up or court rulings go forward.
CHS reported here on performances and a puppet show held at the park last weekend to rally against the efforts to end nudity at Denny Blaine Park. “The courts can say what they want, because fuck it, we’re getting naked,” an organizer said.
Seattle Parks has not announced details of the recent installations and rules around the nude zone. CHS asked the department for more details about the work but did not hear back.
UPDATE: Parks provided a few details on the changes.”Fencing and new signage are being put in place in accordance with the plan submitted to the court. Fencing will obscure views into the park,” a spokesperson said. “The park will be divided into three zones, two of which will be clothing optional. The signage and the fencing will support these zones and appropriate use.”
Signage will also communicate park hours and park code of conduct, the department says.
The park is open daily 6 AM to 10 PM.
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what a hilarious non-solution. i mean fundamentally you can see right past the fence through the opening. oh no, nudity is visible.
but who will even come to the non-nude “zone” – basically the parking lot and a few square feet of grass — which now has no view of the water because there’s a big fence in the way, and if you want to see it you run the risk of seeing people’s bodies… the horror.
this is leaving aside the whole charade that this in any way addresses the alleged criminal behavior (which has repeatedly failed to be substantiated). it kind of lays bare the actual intent here, which was basically get these naked gays off my lawn. but even that was not accomplished. what a tremendous waste of time and money.
How do you know it hasn’t be substantiated? i got curious after the judge said there was an problem: found a pretty scary/real incident from in king county court. #23-1-02214-5 filing in January of this year: guy was masturbating and then beat up a sunbather and dragged him into the water shouting homophobic slurs. the guy was rightfully charged with assault and hate crime. and then that same guy is arrested in the park again this spring for jerking off while out on bail.
All allegations until proven in court, but incident obviously has been substantiated if a prosecutor charged the guy with assault and a felony hate crime in court. I would hate to think (and struggle to believe) the kc prosecutor office would make that kind of thing up when trying to protect people from violence.
few more sex/incident exposure charges in the public record/court systems (nothing like that one tho). So all of that, and the videos tv news played when this all came back up again a few months ago, and it’s kind of hard to say with a straight face its the criminal behavior is made up, or thigns have “failed to be substantiated” when there’s a civil rights attorney working on a hate crime case that happened in the park. these things can and do happen in public spaces everywhere — and that also means its happened at Denny Blaine.,Just a few weeks ago CHS wrote about an overnight fight with knives and slashed tires. can debate how serious/relevant it is to the nude use, but its not great.
all of this is just one part… motives, whose voice is heard, queer/lgbtq marginalized community needs, public access to public places…are all central and should be focus. but lets not say things
city needs to figure something out. seems like a no win is on the horizon
One whole person? Wow! Crime wave!
Just because the judge split the baby, doesn’t mean a thing one way or the other. But you do you.
yeah, I remember reading about that guy. I didn’t mention it because it doesn’t substantiate the accusations of the group pushing for changes, which is chronic sex and drug use by the beachgoers. In fact the only real arrest was that guy, who was not a beachgoer but there to harass the beachgoers. It’s like if someone said, the bartenders at that bar are overserving, and then a drunk guy shows up and starts a fight and the cops arrest him. yes a crime occurred but it isn’t the one we care about.
knowing what we know about the group attempting to shut down the nudity and also what we have seen about police willing to arrest people for protesting or non-illegal nudity… and given there have been months and months of opportunity, years even for this group to produce evidence of this allegedly frequent misconduct, and they have pretty much nothing but claims.
I do think everyone using the park should do so responsibly and respectfully, they may be annoying rich people but they are neighbors and members of the community. so if there are complaints of say sex or loud music or fights, they should be taken seriously. but it’s not a public nudity problem when there’s fights and slashed tires you know? it’s a late night party police problem and yes it should be addressed. but again not really relevant to the get off my lawn complaints.
So, public nudity is generally legal in Seattle if it’s not accompanied by lewd or threatening acts. A person could, for example, walk naked down a city sidewalk.
But then our hypothetical nude pedestrian reaches a sign saying clothes are required near the street in the park, so they can’t reach the clothing-optional zones.
Instead, they turn around, still legally nude, and walk back down the neighborhood sidewalks to leave.
If many park users were equally law-abiding, they’d inadvertently form a constant parade of legally nude pedestrians through the neighborhood.
Denny Blaine represents an aspect of queer culture that homophobes and transphobes with enough money and clout can push away and stomp out, even in a “liberal” city that should be stepping up to protect us, because queer human bodies are still viewed as an affront to our culturally protestant sensibilities. We are seeing effects of the reach of far-right fascist “purity” ideology into queer spaces to push away, silence and eradicate our presence. They focus on Denny Blaine because it is a culturally queer space, and the public nudity aspect makes it an easy target for these pearl-clutchers. Same old same old. Same fight as always. We just wanna be naked with our community and hang out next to the water together. It’s exhausting.
Come on – that sound ridiculous. There are lots of LGBTQ people who don’t feel they need to be naked with each other in a public park. Just like cis gender and heterosexual people don’t need this. The lewd conduct at the park was due to lax enforcement – it should be enforced.
I can’t believe a small loud contingent is still getting their way even tho it’s not a nude beach, it’s a public park.
Yeah… no cis gender or hetero people ever go to nude beaches lol. Totally.
Are you kidding me… what a load of drama. That’s are so many spaces and places fire EVERYONE in Seattle. Spend some time outside of it. You’re limited view sucks. This is a public space… and therefore under skyscraper FOR ALL. if you want to be naked .. go to Tiger Mountain. Fuck off. BTW… my family member is Trans and I live your community but fucking selfish.
You got a family member who’s trans?
OH! What a missed opportunity. You are an expert. Never been there. Never gonna go there. But you got the righteous take?
but now they are going to put a fence to provide privacy.. oh yeah? for someone to get raped? for homeless to live there? so neighbors who like the nud beach cant be aware of their surroundings? gooood job…..
1800s Victorian England telegraphed and wants their pearl clutching prudes back.
It’s amazing how fast Bruce can make things happen when his wealthy benefactors tell him to.
Absurdities all around. Mishandled all the way around, partly by grandstanders opportunistically using the news op to trumpet their egos and agendas. And a poorly thought-out crude, blunderbuss, unsightly approach by the City that is offensive on several fronts.
The mayor panders to the whining fatcat in his new house built fully aware of the public beach and its longstanding nude use immediately next door. The PC-beholden City panders to the LBGTIA+ yadayada community inordinately as a quasi-designated oppressed community – it’s a public beach, not an exclusively LB+ beach. And the LB+ community walks into a door politically and from a PR standpoint to have its more zealous activists agitate this thing as an LB+ civil rights matter when it’s a non-denominational naturist rights issue. In the process, the City stupidly ends up stigmatizing the LB+ community as causing the problem. Perhaps it was inadvertent, but that just points out how little thinking and no wisdom went into City Hall’s addressing this issue.
If the situation were properly investigated (by an understandably over-stressed cop shop, partly – but only partly – of its own doing, which I know would rather not have to deal with this at all and has been appropriately live-and-let-live for decades) the perps would be found likely to be mostly heterosexual creeps attracted by all the dramatized hubbub (get it, Sloan? – be careful what you wish for) to have a captive audience for their compulsive and anti-social exhibitionism unwanted by everyone else, including the vast majority of the LB+ community. And mouthbreathing gawkers from all around, ditto.
We as a community should have been and should be quietly but openly busting the individual perps, not the beach as a whole. Seems to me a few random weeks of arrests by undercover LEs (plenty folks are textiles there) and random shows of uniforms would get the message out. What’s the strategy? What are the tactics?
This goes completely against the design principles calling for open sightlines in the name of saftery that Parks continually shoves down our throats during every other meeting
Well? There’s one good thing to come of this BS?
The “curious” home owners won’t feel the unholy temptations they suppress in their daily lives. They got a fence.
I wonder if Seattle will ever have the luxury of having either a Rooster Rock (PDX Area) or Wreck Beach (Vancouver BC Area). Denny Blaine unfortunately will never be either of those.
I don’t mind the nudity at Denny Blaine but it’s common knowledge amongst us gays that public masturbation occurs there from time to time. I know people here are saying that it doesn’t go on or it’s a rare thing but we truly know that it happens more often than we want to openly admit. A good friend of mine recently told me of this one guy who isn’t all there mentally publicly masturbating at Denny Blaine. Now whether or not anyone has the balls to tell someone publicly masturbating or doing more to stop it is the real question.