BY margaret Laliberte, EASTSIDE HERITAGE CENTER VOLUNTEER

The Vertical File at Eastside Heritage Center is a treasure trove of original miscellany—largely newspaper clippings—organized into hundreds of topics pertaining to Eastside history. An old-fashioned browse through a manila file is likely to turn up intriguing and unexpected tidbits for those with a love of our local history. Take the Bellevue Parks files, for example. Here’s a sample of some little-known and/or long forgotten stories about three Bellevue parks.

Enatai Park’s “Crater.” The park, at 10661 S.E. 25th St., is a peaceful sanctuary of big left maple and conifers. But to access the picnic tables and children’s play area the visitor must make a steep descent into what appears to be a deep crater. How can this be? An article by local historian Lucile McDonald dated October 23, 1983 (newspaper unknown) solves the mystery. At the same time that the first floating bridge between Mercer Island and Seattle was being built in the late 1930s, crews were also improving the old roadway leading east to North Bend to create the four-lane Sunset Highway. The local Lakeside Gravel Company excavated a large gravel deposit on the site of today’s park to provide surfacing material for the new roadway. Once the quarry was no longer needed, the crater was used for while as a garbage dump until local residents stymied that use. The property was sold in 1940, and in 1950 the owner sold the property to the City of Bellevue.

McCormick Park’s granite “ruin.” A familiar sight in the narrow park that runs along the north side of N.E. 12th St. in downtown Bellevue, across from the Belletini residence, is the enigmatic granite construction that some might feel looks like a ruined cathedral. Its backstory can be found in a June 23, 1989 Journal American editorial. The sculptor, Brian Goldbloom, created numerous pieces of public art in the Pacific Northwest during that era, working mainly with natural stone materials. According to the editorial, his vision of this creation was something that would add a sense of the past to Bellevue, which he felt is too young to have a deep sense of time and place. He also wanted to create something that would, in his words, “draw people in so they’d want to hang around.” Ironically, the current pandemic created the circumstances that have drawn small groups of two or three locals at a time to sit on the stone pieces of this artwork to socialize.

Bellefields Nature Park, Bellevue American newspaper clipping.

Bellefields Nature Park’s tikis and totem. The separate identity of this early park has vanished today, merged into the larger Mercer Slough Nature Park. The land for the original Bellefields Nature Park, at the north end of the slough and running between 118th Ave. N.E. and Bellevue Way, was purchased by the City of Bellevue in 1957. Because of the deep deposits of peat underlying the site, original plans to develop tennis courts and a golf course had to be shelved. As Lucile McDonald explained in a 1983 article, “the greens would be bouncy,” and costs to develop the area would be prohibitive. So Siegfried Semrau, the city’s park’s director, decided to develop a “nature park.” Boys from the state’s Youth Corps built a network of trails through the park over four years, earning $25 a week for their work. A 1969 article in the Bellevue American noted that the park department’s sign maker, Earl “Bud” Baunsgard. “ has created several wood carvings… to surprise the hiker as he strolls along the trails. Two tikis and a totem pole greet park users with a trio of brightly colored frogs.”

The tikis and totem are long gone, but a “heritage” park sign built by Baunsgard still stands in the city’s Killarney Park.

Resources

Eastside Heritage Center Archives