Park History
The roots of Cal Anderson Park go all the way back to the late 1889, when the City of Seattle was looking to grow it’s water infrastructure in response to the Great Seattle Fire. The site of the park today was original cleared and constructed to house the Lincoln Reservoir. Shortly after its completion in 1901, the famed Olmstead brothers were hired to design the area around the reservoir, to be called Lincoln Park. One of the original features of the park was a recreation area that included a wading pool, a field house, sand courts and a playground.
A new wading pool, playground, and sand courts were installed in Lincoln Park circa 1907 near Olive Street, which is visible in the background.
Baseball at Lincoln Park circa 1919. The open-air Lincoln Reservoir is visible in the background.
The area to the south of the reservoir was developed as a playfield, and in 1922 its name was changed to Broadway Playfield so as not to cause confusion with Lincoln Park in West Seattle.
In 1980, the Broadway Playfield was once again renamed, this time to honor Bobby Morris, a long-time Broadway Playfield supervisor, Broadway Highschool alum, and local sports referee who later became the King County Auditor.
Lincoln Reservoir - 1927 (courtesy of seattle.gov)
In the 1970s, the park informally hosted some of the first Seattle-area Pride festivals and marches, laying the ground for future generations of community activism in the heart of Capitol Hill.
In the early 1990s, a community group formed to capitalize on plans to cover the reservoir with a mission to build welcoming, open space for the densely populated neighborhood and bring new life to this community resource.
In April 2003, the park was officially named Cal Anderson Park, in honor and recognition of Washington State’s first openly gay state legislator. The reservoir was covered, construction got underway, and in 2005 the long neglected and underused area finally became the jewel of the Capitol Hill neighborhood that we know today.
Dedication of Cal Anderson Park in 2003, photo courtesy of Kay Rood.
You can read more about how the grassroots organization “Groundswell Off Broadway” created Cal Anderson Park in this essay written by the community group’s leader Kay Rood.
In 2020, a month-long occupation protest formed in the park in response to tense interactions between protesters and police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. This protest expanded to incorporate several blocks of Capitol Hill, and was was eventually self-titled the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP).
In 2021, the AIDS Memorial Pathway and associated artwork was unveiled along the north edge of the park, and into the adjacent Capitol Hill Station Plaza.