Julia Lee's Park transferred to Seattle Parks and Recreation

Julia Lee's Park, a small private park used by Madison Valley residents for a generation, has been transferred into city ownership.

On Monday, Oct. 24, three of the four children -- and one grandson -- of the late businessman Cal Knudsen and Julia Lee Knudsen stood with Deputy Parks Superintendent Christopher Williams and Deputy Mayor of Operations Kate Joncas to commemorate the transfer of the park after 23 years of ownership under a family trust.

"This is a story of love," Joncas said. "A man's love for a neighborhood and love for his wife."

Dedicated as Knudsen Family Park in 1993 and renamed a year later, Julia Lee's Park was built by Cal Knudsen as a memorial to his wife. The two had met as students at the University of Washington and married in 1950 in New York, where he studied law at Columbia University and she taught at a private school in Brooklyn. They soon returned to the Pacific Northwest, where they started their family. Julia Lee took every opportunity to get outside, either playing sports or dipping into the cold waters of Lake Washington, daughter Page Knudsen Cowles said. They had been married 40 years when she died of sudden heart failure in 1990.

"She was only 65," Cowles said. "I'm 61 now, and dad lasted another 20 years. ... Believe me, you're still young at that age. It was a shock."

Cal Knudsen maintained an office at the rear of the Madison Square building, where he could look out over the juncture of Martin Luther King Jr. Way East, East Arthur Place and East Harrison Street. At the time of Julia Lee's death, the corner opposite him was an empty lot.

So he bought it.

He hired designer Ann Smith and landscape architect Glenn Takanagi to transform the lot into a small garden into an Italian style piazza modeled after his own home, built as a circle surrounding a single Norway Maple -- installed at 10,000 pounds and grown larger over 23 years, longtime caretaker Cevin Jacobson said. Cal Knudsen believed it was a fitting monument to his wife and her love of the outdoors.

"Any time he looked out his office window, he was able to remember our mother," Cowles said. 

He funded it himself through his Madison Valley Parks Foundation, but Julia Lee's Park was always open to the public.Sometimes to its detriment -- Takanagi recalled the park originally featured crushed marble and box hedges that were eventually replaced to end repeated damage. But it was important to the family that the park be enjoyed by all.

So Cowles said, when Thatcher Bailey of the Seattle Parks Foundation approached them about making the park public property, officially, it made sense.

"It was time," she said. "It started as a memorial to my mother and developed into a community amenity enjoyed and supported by everyone in this neighborhood.

"Now it will always be in the budget for Seattle Parks."