Volunteer Park
Hilltop Olmsted park with a brick water tower, glass conservatory, and sweeping city views.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Volunteer Park in Seattle climbs the water tower's iron stairs to a June evening in nineteen seventy-four, when a small crowd on roller skates marked Seattle's first Gay Pride Week from the observation deck. It traces the decades before that, when gay men used the park's shadowed paths after dark because the city offered nowhere else to meet, and the police sweeps and entrapment tactics that followed. It also follows the city's later attempts to redesign the park after a nineteen ninety-one newspaper still called it a cruising ground. Climb to the stone deck atop the brick tower for the view that crowd once sang from.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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