When it opened on the bicentennial of the independence of the United States, the Brutalist masterwork Freeway Park in Seattle, Washington, was the first of its kind: a park constructed over a freeway. I recall feeling that while New York City may have had a parade of tall ships¹ the opening of this park which PBS would identify years later as one of ten parks that changed America² was at least as momentous a way of celebrating the Fourth of July. The park bridged a chasm in the City created when Interstate 5 was constructed and featured a 30‐foot‐tall waterfall formed of poured concrete monoliths, over which flowed 28,000 gallons of water each minute. To paraphrase Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, the park engaged the three major preoccupations of post‐War landscape design: the car, the garden, and the growing awareness of ecology. A staircase winding to the bottom of the waterfall led to a window overlooking the traffic passing on the freeway below, where the sonic curtain drawn by the water falling through the unbound volume above altogether silenced the vehicular racket. I was delighted when I discovered that window, and the park became the first public space I would recognize as the expression of an idea.
More than four decades after it first opened, my wife and I strolled through the park last week with friends while saying farewell to them as they departed on a move across the country. This is the worst of things for me to hazard, this parting from people of whom I am very fond, for as I grow older, the fear of permanence becomes proportionally more rational and influential. When William Gaddis described maturity as a state of political bigotry, mental obstinacy, financial security, sensual atrophy, emotional penury, and spiritual collapse, he failed to mention helpless realization. Friendship survives distance but is cheated of vitality when not invested with the animating force of presence and easily slips into desuetude. The prospect of yielding it fills me with dread. The trees in the park have become dense and shade neglected plantings overgrown with weeds. The fountains languish in disrepair. Must we become careless with that which once was gravid with hopefulness? Must we acclimate to the disorder? Must we learn, too late, we grieved the sun in flight? It is fitting that I resolve not to surrender this friendship to the insult of neglect while on this ground I trod when the roots were new that have grown to become memory.