You can’t get to Terry Pettus Park; not today. The park named for a Seattle legend has been vandalized and seemingly forgotten. The pocket-sized park at 2001 Fairview East has been fenced off and currently is inaccessible to visitors.
That situation is bad enough. What’s worse is that no one in Seattle leadership seems concerned enough to respond to those who care. Yet Terry Pettus, for whom the park was named, is well worth remembering.
Pettus is the hero who stepped in and saved the Lake Union houseboats when they were about to be evicted. A newspaper man — and a good one — Pettus was the first member of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. He led the 1930s newspaper strike that defeated William Randoph Hearst’s media empire and confirmed the union’s right to organize and negotiate for wages. And Pettus also was once a Communist Party member and the only Seattleite to serve prison time for having joined the party.
A minister’s kid born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1927, Terry and his wife Berta came to Seattle in theh 1930s, first moving in with Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan. During the Depression, Pettus joined the Communist Party over concern for the plight of working people. He edited The New Dealer, newspaper of the Washington Commonwealth Federation (WCF), a leftist wing of the Democratic Party. After the WCF dissolved, Pettus became editor of the Communist Party paper, The People’s World.
When the Canwell Committee, Washington’s infamous precursor to the McCarthy witch hunts, came for him in 1948, Pettus didn’t deny his party membership. He was sentenced to five years in prison and an additional three years for refusing to name other party members. Eventually Pettus’s sentence was overturned but not before he had spent 60 days behind bars. Blacklisted and unable to find a job, Pettus survived by writing detective fiction under a pseudonym.
In 1958, Pettus formally withdrew from the Communist Party. He blamed the party’s increasingly authoritarian structure, but he never expressed regret for his one-time membership. He was quoted saying, “I fought for old age pensions, the right to organize, a minimum wage, and against racism and discrimination – apologize for that?”
Later, it was Pettus who led the fight to keep the city from evicting the houseboats from their Lake Union moorages. The city had complained about untreated sewage although the lake had been polluted by industrial waste for decades. Pettus organized his fellow house boaters and encouraged them to tax themselves to pay for cleanup even though other homes and businesses also contributed to contamination. Pettus helped establish the Floating Homes Association and helped craft the Shoreline Management Act.
His battle on behalf of the houseboats restored Pettus’ reputation and made him into a hero. Mayor Charles Royer designated March 7, 1982, as Terry Pettus Day. When Pettus died at 80 in 1984, he was celebrated as a legend who represented the city’s tumultuous labor history as well as its environmental awareness. The city set aside the street end just south of the houseboats as Terry Pettus Park in 1985.
Over the years, the small park became overgrown and neglected. When Mary (Dixie) Pintler, one of Terry Pettus’ houseboat friends, saw the park’s wretched condition in 2017, she began working on rehabilitation. She bought a boulder, paying $700 to have it hauled it to the park. She asked her son, Bill Johnson, to design a bronze plaque celebrating Pettus and had the plaque affixed to the boulder.
That was 2018. Since then, the park has been further vandalized, including the plaque. A look at the city’s official website shows there are plans for restoring and enlarging the park, adding property to the south. However, whenever authorities are asked, they say they’re still waiting for the necessary permits.
Dixie Pentler recently wrote to Mayor Harrell. In part she said, “The park is in worse shape than when I began my efforts in 2017… Today the park is ’closed for unsafe conditions’; it has been abandoned and allowed to fall into a state of disgrace. Two weeks ago the plaque which was my gift to the Parks department was destroyed, vandalized. Architecture plans and financing have been in place for over five years! Every year when I call to ask about the status I hear the same sad story: The permitting process is stalemated. I turn to you as the Mayor to please find out what is holding things up for such an unforgivable amount of time.”
Dixie Pentler is now in her 90s and living in Edmonds. When contacted recently she told of routing dozens of letters on behalf of park restoration to Seattle’s leaders. She’s hoping that the outcry will have some success. But, in speaking about it, she turns wistful, saying, “I’m just hoping to see work get underway while I’m still alive.”
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Several larger issues are revealed by this story. One is that all of Seattle’s parks have been allowed to lapse into a state of neglect and disrepair for years (similar to most other public services… Where does all our money go?).
The other is that Seattle’s government has gotten too big to fail, or at least too big to care, and is generally unresponsive to requests for assistance from citizens or even groups of citizens.