Want to Examine Income Inequality in the South End? Take ‘The Wealth Walk’

On a recent summer evening, a group of about a dozen people stood in the Lakewood Triangle – a pocket park in Mount Baker – taking in the well-to-do neighborhood. The group was half an hour into a walking tour of the area, surrounded by the trappings of luxury: fancy cars parked in driveways; Tudor-style red brick homes facing a placid Lake Washington; and quiet streets occasionally disturbed by an overhead plane or an errant jogger. A sense of calm settled around the million-dollar homes and well-maintained avenues as bees slept on lavender spikes. 

But the calm felt weighted with meaning for the group, who had gathered for The Wealth Walk, a new 'hyperlocal' theatrical tour of the Mount Baker and Rainier Valley neighborhoods. Led and written by actor Ryan Purcell, the tour covered a two-mile loop where Purcell dispensed information and performed thought exercises that dug into the area's history. He also offered perspective on wealth inequality in the United States. The tour, produced by arts ensemble The Feast, will run Aug. 8-31.

And every step on the tour counts. At the beginning, Purcell established that for every step an individual took during The Wealth Walk, an imaginary $1,000 would be added to their personal bank account. Standing in Lakewood Triangle, which is around a half-mile into the tour, the group had accumulated about $1.7 million, the lifetime income of the average American worker. Purcell asked everyone to think of someone they thought could be that worker and posed questions about this person. 

“Who do they consider their family? What do they like to do for fun?” he asked the group. “How did they die or how will they die?” A pause. “What will they leave behind?” 

Much of The Wealth Walk mirrors this balance between body and mind, nesting the story of Mount Baker and Rainier Valley along a quotidian walking route. Though there is no stage or set design, the tour is theatrical in the sense that it positions the neighborhood and the audience members as characters within history. We all play our part within the wealth disparity in this country, regardless of our class background. 

If a two-mile loop around the hilly neighborhood sounds a bit daunting, consider how overwhelming it is to grasp the amount of wealth the top 1 percent holds in this country. Even when the value of each step increased from $1,000 to $1 million halfway through the tour, by the end of the walk the group’s accumulated wealth barely touched the $404 billion net worth of Elon Musk, who’s purportedly on track to become a trillionaire by 2027. 

“Scale is hard. It’s like our brains have a hard time with it in a lot of ways. When the scale gets out of balance, bodies can sometimes do a better job,” said Purcell, artistic director of The Feast, in a recent interview. “[The Wealth Walk] was trying to move the scale back into the body to make it real again.”

The idea of this piece germinated back in 2020 during COVID lockdowns when Purcell, a Beacon Hill resident and Franklin High School ‘00 alum, took long walks around the city, marinating in the history of various neighborhoods. When a friend pointed him to a website depicting wealth inequality to scale, he “started on this idea of how to marry the history of this place with the experience of walking through it,” he said. 

Purcell decided to focus on Mount Baker because of its history as a planned community: The Mount Baker Park Addition was built and developed by the Hunter Tract Improvement Company in 1907 for specifically wealthy — and white — residents. At various points along the route, Purcell pointed out how the exclusivity was maintained with racial covenants barring Black and Japanese-American families from buying homes in the neighborhood into the mid-20th century. 

Mount Baker stands in contrast with Rainier Valley, which immediately buttresses it, advertised as one of the most diverse communities in the nation and a source of constant change due to continued development and displacement. During the walk the change between both communities is felt almost instantly: As you step across the neighborhood boundary from Mount Baker to Rainier Valley, the homes become noticeably more middle-class and overgrown, noise begins to pollute your ears, powerlines frame the sky. 

Purcell pieced together the script from various records from the Rainier Valley Historical Society, the Duwamish Longhouse, the Office of Neighborhoods’ historical context essays, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, and other sites like Redfin and Zillow. Throughout the walk, the information is presented in a walking tour-like cadence: chipper, informative, seemingly neutral. But as the walk continues, the beauty of Mount Baker feels more complicated because it had been constructed and maintained by exclusionary practices. 

Though the walk is fairly level and on sidewalks for most of the tour, there are hills and stairs that might make it inaccessible to those using mobility aids. Purcell said he’s in the midst of developing a version of The Wealth Walk for a theatrical experience in the fall so anyone can access it beyond this summer. Additionally, The Feast is working with game designer and theatre director Adrienne Mackey to make a self-guided mobile app for those who wish to go on the walk whenever they like. 

“At its best, theater is a great opener to the range of experience,” said Purcell. “My hope is that the walk is a way that the audience gets to think about [wealth] not as something external, but it's something that they are also a part of.”

The Wealth Walk: Aug. 8-31, various times, $15. Tour starts at Mount Baker Park, 2521 Lake Park Dr. S.