Magnusan Park Washington

Blues for Food Gets Its Groove On at Magnuson Park

Founded by Deb Rock (a long time Interbay P-Patch Food Bank Gardener), the Blues for Food Fest is an all-ages celebration of food and music that features some of the Northwest's best bands--and it's for a good cause. BFF (which has a real cute acronym, if you ask us) was created to raise awareness about hunger and the P-Patch gardens in Seattle, which donate over 28,000 pounds of organic produce to people in need every year.

The event is family-friendly, with lots to do including exploring worm bins, bug hunts, seed saving and making art sculptures. Facing a squash and zucchini attack? BFF will also be collecting your home-grown produce at the Lettuce Link/Solid Ground booth to help feed the hungry.

Be sure to bring an empty stomach, since they’ll be a homemade pie auction and food truck vittles from Where Ya at Matt and Pai’s.

Magnuson Park:: Reconstructed Wetlands | The Metropolitan Field ...

Magnuson Park is located in Seattle along Lake Washington, north of the University of Washington. The park has a long history of dramatic land use change and part of it has now come back full circle. In the days of early settlers the area was a wetlands, alder grove, and Douglas fir forest with trees up to six feet in diameter. In the following years the site saw a homestead, brickyard, shipyard and post office.  This landscape was altered in 1917 with the building of the canals and Ballard Locks  when the level of Lake Washington was lowered by nine feet on the shores of Magnuson Park. The previous creek dried up and Mud Lake shrunk into a small pond. Later the land was changed even more dramatically when the Navy took it over. Nearly the entire area of the park was paved over for runways and Mud Lake was completely filled in and the rest of the topography was leveled out using 1,500,000 cubic yards of soil. It wasn’t until 1981 when one part of the land transferred to the City of Seattle and the rest to NOAA, that it became a park. By that time, only around 30 percent of the park was unpaved. However, it was only turned into a park through the efforts of Warren G. Magnuson, a senator who fought others who wanted to make the space into a county airstrip.

Today the park is the second largest in the city of Seattle with 350 acres and a mile-long stretch of shoreline. The park offers a huge variety of use, the shoreline has a trail for bikers or skaters, there are swimming areas, a kite hill (built with 40,000 tons of demolished runway), ball fields and tennis courts, a community garden, a large off-leash dog park, buildings for events, a backyard wildlife demonstration garden, nature areas, playground, wading pool, public art and most recently, reconstructed wetlands. Many of the old buildings are in desperate need of renovation and one has recently been fully renovated into a large indoor sporting facility. NOAA also has a home on the northern section of the park. The entire park is an opportunity for wildlife with over 100 species of birds seen around the park. There is also a butterfly garden designed by a local school and other habitat throughout the park includes grasslands, shoreline, woodlands and of course wetlands.

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