Event celebrates parks’ legacy

Neighbors around Cannon Hill Park on Spokane’s South Side are holding a celebration Saturday to call attention to the park’s historic legacy as well as the legacy of parks throughout the city.

Cannon Hill Park was designed by the nationally renowned Olmsted brothers of Brookline, Mass., who were hired to write a comprehensive plan for Spokane city parks in the early 1900s. The report was completed in 1908 and made public in 1913.

Saturday’s event is being billed as a Centennial Celebration of Olmsted designed parks in Spokane.

The celebration begins at 11 a.m. with a children and baby buggy parade around the park for ages 12 and younger.

A tour of four homes along the park will run from noon to 4 p.m. Tickets are $10. Proceeds will go to park improvement. The homes on the tour are at 703, 807 and 823 W. Shoshone Place and 2021 S. Stevens Street.

“We hope to increase awareness of how great our park is and how great our neighborhood is,” said Amy Shook, who is heading up the celebration through the Manito/Cannon Hill Neighborhood Council.

Sally Reynolds, a historian and expert on the Olmsted brothers’ legacy in Spokane, will be at the park during the event to talk about park heritage in Spokane. Republished copies of the report by Olmsted Bros. Landscape Architects will be available for sale.

The Scoop ice cream shop’s ScoopMobile will be there, too.

Under the Olmsted recommendations, city park holdings expanded from 173 acres in 1908 to 1,934 acres in 1913 when the plan was published. A $1 million ballot measure in 1910 paid for many of the acquisitions. The firm called for a system of open spaces, landscaped boulevards, large city parks and neighborhood play areas.

The Olmsteds were considered visionaries for encouraging preservation of open spaces and developing parks that could serve a multitude of uses from active to passive pursuits. Spokane’s large holdings of conservation lands along the Spokane River and Latah Creek are a legacy of their vision, experts said.

Since 1913, the park system in Spokane has doubled to about 4,000 acres.

Some of the Olmsteds’ other work in Spokane includes the layout of the historic Rockwood Neighborhood on the South Hill. Three Garfield Street traffic islands last year were named as the Olmsted Triangle Parks.

Molly Myers-Jakubczak said she agreed to open her home for Saturday’s tour as a way to give something back to her neighborhood. “The least I can do is put it on the tour,” she said.

Proceeds from the tour could be used for a park sign, a plaque or benches, Shook said.