I explored another Seattle landmark on Friday, Freeway Park. It is a park. Built over a freeway. Perhaps you find the idea curious. So did I. That's why I went. I was in the area, after an aborted attempt to buy tickets to Blur which side-tracked me into a bookstore, from which I emerged with a fistful of Ken MacLeod...Freeway Park lurks atop a misshapen concrete platform straddling I-5; I'd noticed it countless times without ever realising what it was. Curiosity overwhelmed me.
Freeway Park is something I'll probably have nightmares about some day. It is a place of Lovecraftian evil.
It's not just passively unpleasant, a place you wouldn't want to be. It's actively grotesque: it wants you to hate it. It is designed to sicken the soul. Imagine you're an ant, crawling around between the world's ugliest Legos, the colour of urban decay. I came into it via a staircase and walkway up from Pike Street, through a twisty, zigzagging narrow walk along a sheer concrete face a storey or so above street level...It was the colour of old, bad malls. The rhododendrons looked like some kind of growth upon a corpse. There were little cul-de-sacs, leading off from the path, bending around on themselves; you couldn't see into them until you entered. You weren't sure who might be there...And that begins to alarm you. Later on it opens up into a sort of square, still framed by giant concrete blocks, like a well-tended slag heap...The trees and grass in that setting actually make you feel more isolated from nature, more like you're encased in something completely artificial and contrived...One feels a great apprehension about seeing another person, or the sort of person who'd be liable to hang out in such a place...A labyrinth of stairs and ramps runs up from this square, cramped, seeming permanently damp. It is impossible to see how they double back on themselves, where they lead, whether two branchings will meet or diverge...One wonders if it will ever end, if one will be trapped forever climbing, dogged by half-imagined steps...This labyrinth is the place in Seattle I would vote Most Likely to Harbour an Evil Dwarf who will Pull my Brains out of my Nose with a Crochet Hook. This inability to see where anything goes, these blind alleys, this air of solitude and desolation and decay...It feeds a paranoia, which waxes steadily as you go through the park. It comes as an unspeakable relief to emerge again onto the populated streets.
I am not alone in this.
Also, Nyarlathotep lives beneath it. It's true. You may think me mad...Madness would be a blessing. For I have seen things man was not meant to see. I have seen the blasphemies against man, nature and sanity that lurk in the quiet corners of the Interstate highway system.
Posted by aloysius at June 22, 2003 12:06 AM | TrackBack |