Grand Avenue Park: "Near this Spot"

I've been to Grand Avenue Park a million times over the years, and I've never thought of it as much of a "park." With its well maintained walking path and narrow strips of grass, it's not really a place to play, but more of a space to relax, sit on a bench, and enjoy the best view in the city of Port Gardner Bay and the Everett waterfront.

It's fitting that it feels like a place of reflection, because on my visit there a week or two ago, I came upon something I'd never realized was there before:

A stone marker with a plaque that reads:

"On the Beach

near this spot

Vancouver

landed June 4, 1792"

 

 



I could instantly imagine the waterfront as a sprawling beach, untouched by modernization -- and the giant masts of the Discovery appearing over the horizon. The grand mansions and old Everett homes behind me vanished in an expanse of deep forest, and I could picture the people of the Snohomish, going about their daily business as they had since the beginning of time, unaware that their world was about to change forever.

According to The History of Everett Parks by Allan May and Dale Preboski:

"The granite marker so inscribed was put in place 123 years later [after 1792] by the Marcus Whitman Daughters of the American Revolution . . . Captain George Vancouver never stood on the bluff. The solid reminder at Grand Avenue Park is meant to approximate the location of his visit.

History has it that the English explorer was fascinated by the place. He should have climbed the bluff. Despite what must have been a voyage of adventure and beauty for Vancouver in the late 1700s, he could have added from this outlook a memorable view . . . Then, the water was nearer to the bluff. Landfills extending into the bay were far in the future. Arriving through the forest, the view from the bluff must have been spectacular.

The native Snohomish tribe knew this place. The rough stumped and struggling city preserved it, with a park created in 1906. Thirteen years after the city was established . . . land for the Grand Avenue Park was sold to the city by the Everett Improvement Company for the legal fee of $1" (25).

Everett's parks have a way of encapsulating the divergent strands of its environmental and social history (as we'll explore more): the Native tribes, the European explorers, the settlers, the capitalists. In this way, I see them as a crossroads -- a physically constructed signpost of Everett's imagined identity, a space to connect its history to its future -- carved out of the natural landscape.