Birnbaum: How did Freeway Park come to be?

Lawrence Halprim: The reason for the park and the whole exercise was that the city of Seattle where the Freeway Park is, had hosted, you know, a World's Fair. I cannot remember the date, but it was --the early sixties. It was very nice. I was asked to participate as a member of a design committee which supervised the aesthetics of the park, of the World's Fair. But, which included Paul Thierry and Minoru Yamasaki, myself and some of us, [ was a ] very nice group. And we did some things that were quite good. We decided to put a monorail from the downtown area to the park that people could use. It was the first example in the United States of how to use a monorail in a creative way. And it was very useful. It was very jolly. People loved to use it instead of driving a car. We're so pleased.

One of the major things I helped with, I said let's plant all the streets with street trees, which we did and I think that's helped Seattle a lot. One of the things that did happen, which Paul Thierry particularly was annoyed by, and I was too, that there was a freeway from the airport designed that would bring people to the downtown area which cut the two pieces of Seattle asunder. It was a chasm. I made a drawing, which is in a book called Freeways, which showed how this could be healed. There is a drawing of a freeway doing exactly what happened and instead of accepting the cutting of the two pieces asunder, I showed how you could build a development on top of the freeway which would knit back the two pieces. The people up in Seattle saw that and they asked me to come and design something that would accomplish, accomplish something that would be like that. And so I started with that and did a whole series of studies which showed that it would be possible and how it would be possible, but that instead of building buildings on top of it, it would put a park. And that was the origin of Freeway Park, which then did exactly that and [it] was a lid that had some wonderful qualities about it. It accepted the idea of the chasm by including wonderful waterfalls that fell down into the chasm where you could see the cars go by. And then within the area enclosed by the freeway we did some wonderful stepped Babylonic-type gardens full of plants and lovely things.