The park at 7th Avenue S and S Cloverdale Street in the South Park neighborhood, formerly named after Cesar Chavez, finally has a new name: Parque Libertad.
According to The Seattle Times:
“Libertad (‘freedom’) is a universal value that reflects the enduring pursuit of civil rights, equality and opportunity for all,” Seattle Parks and Recreation Interim Superintendent Michele Finnegan said in a news release. “Parque Libertad honors the many individuals and communities who have advanced justice throughout Seattle’s history while creating a welcoming, inclusive place that celebrates freedom, belonging and civic participation for future generations,” she added.
One wonders if Parque Libertad was chosen instead of, say, Dolores Huerta Park, because of governments reconsidering the wisdom of naming things for individual people. As Nancy Friedman writes in Stop naming buildings (and streets, and parks, and ships, and mountains) after people:
Once we attach a human being’s name to an institution, we’re stuck with that human’s whole messy story. While it’s instructive to read about and learn from that story, we can (and should) do it without turning the person’s name into an object of civic reverence.
Libertad (Spanish for “liberty”) is a concept that will hopefully never fall out of favor.
Born and raised in Seattle, Benjamin Donguk Lukoff had his interest in local history kindled at the age of six, when his father bought him settler granddaughter Sophie Frye Bass’s Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle at the gift shop of the Museum of History and Industry. He studied English, Russian, and linguistics at the University of Washington, and went on to earn his master’s in English linguistics from University College London. His book of rephotography, Seattle Then and Now, was published in 2010. An updated version came out in 2015.
