What Lies Beneath Columbia Park: The Buried Stream in Columbia City

Some places in Seattle make themselves known. They assert. Formal memorials and murals brazenly portray past leaders or cultural heroes. Others, still ripe with meaning, are less sanctioned and exist often at odds with and in resistance to formality: graffiti tags, a pop-up, or the secret name for a thing only you and a loved one share. Columbia Park in Columbia City is such a place, with a hidden history hinted at by the memorial at its center.

Walking through Columbia Park, you may notice a meandering paved path with colored blue lights embedded in it. The path may remind you of flowing water, with trees and houses forming suggested banks. Glance at your feet, and you'll see a metal placard that reads: "A Stream once meandered through a ravine on the path you are about to walk."

My fascination with Columbia Park's hidden stream began while finding my footing in a new place, through walking and noticing, and especially through exploring the bounty of Washington produce at the farmers market held there on Wednesdays May through October. Like listening to a song enough times to finally feel its whole resonance, the focal point of the meandering path and its significance eventually washed over me. I cared about the stream. About the life it must have supported and the decisions that shaped its unbecoming.

On a run months later, I felt the water of this hidden-yet-not-so-hidden stream, my feet splashing through puddles, my shoes soaked and caked with mud. During consistent rainfall, the water ran down the paved path like a river and cascaded into the storm drain with that familiar churn and gurgle. I saw flooded pools in Genesee Park, saturated pavement piquing the interest of waterfowl. Yet while I was struck by the design of Columbia Park, I struggled to find anything that could point me to its history and planning. I wanted to know not just the story of the water, but also the decisions and processes that shaped its remembrance.

So, I sought out some of Seattle's history keepers, and through interviews with three water historians, the story of the stream flowed forth once more.

The Stream in the Early 20th Century

Written sources and maps all tell one story of the stream and its linear progression from a deep ravine prior to 1891; to a small neighborhood park in 1907; to a dump site from 1919 to 1928; to a filled-in area near a deep pit around 1939; and finally to a public park preserved through litigation in the 1960s and 1970s, with a park memorial added in 2006.

Amir Sheikh, co-founder of the Waterlines Project, which aims to uncover Seattle's landscape histories, works with a range of collaborators, including designers, geologists, university researchers, and Southern Lushootseed language keepers. From public art to knowledge production, the project centers Seattle through its watery places. He encourages others to think beyond human frameworks of time, and to consider the "deep time" of glaciation and erosion.

"Often," said Sheikh, "people ask me to help them imagine the landscape as it was before, and my answer to them is, how far before?" This question centers the stream's unbecoming as one in a long line of the place's histories.

Maps, which themselves legitimize and organize histories, have shaped the hidden stream's story. Mikala Woodward, curator of exhibits and engagement at MOHAI and former director of the Rainier Valley Historical Society, guided me to the 1894 "McKee's Correct Road Map of Seattle and Vicinity," one of the earliest maps that depicts Columbia Park's stream. Created by Redick Mckee, who established a U.S. Geographical Survey (USGS) outpost in Seattle, it is considered the oldest topographical map of Seattle. Water is depicted as blue veins, clearly representing the now-buried stream running through Columbia City and out to Wetmore Slough, which was then a wetland as depicted on the map, now called Genesee Park.

Sheikh says such maps are inherently from a settler-colonial perspective, and by nature of how these maps were created, surveys were not perfect processes.

"The paths of creeks were not always depicted exactly, but they were inferred to the best of a surveyor's ability," said Sheikh, referring to the Public Land Survey System, a cartographic directive that forms one of the underlying basis for historical map data. Surveyors were instructed to walk rigid 1-by-1-mile squares and not deviate from their path. These rigid grid lines form a settler warp and weft, and the imagination is left to add the fill. In a sense, Columbia Park's story is a representation of how different imaginations create places that we all come to relate to.

Fast forward 130 years, and the Waterlines Project Map represents a different story of the area. But the thing about water, Sheikh says, is that it is always remembering its many paths. And thanks to the Waterlines Project and Lushootseed language keepers, we know these paths' many names. According to the work of Southern Lushootseed language experts and Waterlines Project co-creators Nancy Jo Bob and Tami Hohn, Genesee Park, the historic marshy outlet of the stream, was "a place of a supernatural monster, a horned snake."

Patrick Trotter, a stream ecologist and local waterway expert, has drafted a historic archive of Seattle's waterways as they would have appeared and functioned on the landscape in 1850 from the perspective of European American homesteaders. According to Trotter, "Hitts Creek, or the name of the creek running through the ravine, was called so as it originated at Hitts Spring on Beacon Hill. Named so after the Hitts Fireworks company that produced fireworks up on the hill for all sorts of occasions."

The spring, he says, is still active, with residents often reporting wet surfaces around their homes and flooding. While the water flows, it is severed from its time-honored path as it makes its way to new routes.

The Park We Know Today

It's not only maps that present a history of the land and water here; stories also carry the water's past. As I was going through the city archives, the history of the redesign of Columbia Park remained a mystery. I could infer that it was loosely tied to the early 2000s park levy, but any names of landscape architects or firms, public meeting minutes, or commissioned artists were nowhere to be found.

Then, Woodward shared a story of the buried stream's recovery, itself inspired by a story. "The kids at Orca K-8 were fascinated by a story of salmon in the river so plentiful that you could walk across the ravine," said Woodward. She says the anecdote of salmon was told to the children by John Brockhaus, a librarian and public school educator.

So, in 2005, the perfect storm of storytelling, educational support, and youth action brought the new park design to life. What is typically reserved for landscape architecture firms' bidding came to the door of a local school. Fourth graders steered the memorial project, from excavating patches of the park, to analyzing maps, to dreaming and designing.

This integration of humanities and local history with a hands-on approach was one of Woodward's fondest memories with Seattle Public Schools. "I thank the teachers who were so open to letting me lead their students around the park. They were so excited to share what they were doing, finding evidence of the lost stream," Woodward said. "I knew someone at the Parks Department who lent me blue irrigation flags, which the students placed along the route they found."

In this way, nearly two decades ago, water united people across land and epochs to make itself known through fourth graders with a vision, inspired by stories, in alignment with the educational priorities of the public school system and guided by dedicated adults willing to make their dreams happen.

"They were so excited," Woodward said, smiling, "that they proudly told the community what they had been working on at the Columbia City Farmers Market. They handed out original pamphlets and everything."

After the elementary schoolers charted what they believed to be the route of the hidden stream, conversations around the existence of the stream sparked deep and varied opinions about the fate of the park itself. Hearings over the course of months at the Columbia City Branch brought forth ideas of the redevelopment and restoration of the park to highlight the stream as a key feature, or even to daylight the stream and ravine.

Those conversations led to today's memorial. "After the students shared their designs, the project was taken up by a landscape architect who worked for the City," said Woodward.

Through investigating the hidden stream and the stories around it, a unique place in Columbia City emerged. One that reflects innovative student-led projects that allowed the community to see their home differently, and how places can be remade and remembered in the most unexpected ways. And while designs remembering water are not the same as reviving it, and surfaces may be impervious, they are not impervious forever. Perhaps the first steps we can take to restore some of Seattle's waterways are to honor them.

At the end of the conversation with Woodward, I asked if she knew who wrote the words that describe the stream on the metal placard, as there was no attribution.

"It was me," she said, smiling.

Special thanks to the Rainier Valley Historical Society for providing guidance for this piece, as well as Amir Sheikh of the Waterlines Project; Patrick Trotter local historian and author of the forthcoming "Once Upon a Forest Stream: The Hidden Hydrology of Seattle"; and Mikala Woodward of the Museum of History and Industry. And to the teachers and schoolchildren who years ago visioned a project that continues to provoke and inspire today.

Editors' Note: This article was updated on Feb. 4, 2026, to correct numbers regarding the Public Land Survey and to correct Amir Sheikh's description of his collaborators and a quote attributed to him.