Growing Community Space from Concrete
Established in 2012, UpGarden is a sustainable community garden tucked into the heart of the Lower Queen Anne / Uptown neighborhood. Our origin story is one of partnership and innovation: Seattle Center and the Department of Neighborhoods teamed up to run a transformative experiment, converting half of the Mercer Garage rooftop into a third space for the neighborhood.
Could concrete become a sustainable community space for gardening?
Neighbors in the Uptown neighborhood worked alongside landscape architects Eric Higbee and Nicole Kistler of Kistler | Higbee Cahoot to find out. UpGarden was funded by the 2008 Parks and Green Space Levy and is one of 91 urban community gardens across the city that make up the P-Patch Program.
Our community embraced this bold challenge and gave it life.
Over the course of three community workshops, neighbors and designers came together to conceptualize what we wanted the space to become and hash out all the construction details for a successful build. Community members donated thousands of volunteer hours to make it a reality.
Save UpGarden Campaign
In October 2019, we got some unwelcome news on the rooftop: an eviction notice. UpGarden would soon be demolished and paved over to reclaim parking spaces in service of the newly renovated and renamed Climate Pledge Arena. We weren’t going to let that happen without a challenge and so we launched the “Save UpGarden” campaign. The community showed up: our Change.org petition collected over 1,500 signatures.
UpGarden is saved through the power of community action.
Newly elected District 7 Councilmember Andrew Lewis was sworn into office right here on our rooftop and announced an agreement reached with Mayor Jenny Durkan and Deputy Mayor Mike Fong to keep the garden open and in place. The community impact of UpGarden outweighed the value of extra parking.
UpGarden remains open to the public, a hidden gem in the heart of the city.
The word is out and photographers, painters and sketch artists both local and from further afield are discovering the “secret garden” on top of Mercer Garage. Just an easy walk across the pedestrian bridge from Seattle Center, UpGarden is both a tourist destination and a beloved landmark for those who call our Emerald City home.
UpGarden’s elevated location presents a unique engineering challenge.
While UpGarden is built on top of a parking garage engineered to hold up dozens of cars, special effort had to be taken to consider the weight of the new garden, which is quite heavy. A cubic yard of dry topsoil can weigh about a ton, and much more when wet, which could overwhelm even a concrete parking structure. UpGarden’s design accounted for weight by including shallow terraced planting beds with a lighter-weight mix of potting soil.
UpGarden Today
What does all this history (14 years and counting) add up to? UpGarden is unequivocally a success story and is doing exactly what it was designed to do: grow food and grow community. We are proud of past accomplishments and excited to see what the future will bring.
Organic gardening at Seattle Center is thriving.
Fast-forward to today: UpGarden is home to 86 plots spread across 25,000 square feet of what used to be bare rooftop. A vintage Airstream trailer serves as our community tool shed and an iridescent purple 1963 Ford Galaxie converted into a planter sits parked at the foot of the Giving Garden, which sends hundreds of pounds of fresh produce to local food banks every year.
Redevelopment on the horizon?
UpGarden will stay put as a public garden until Mercer Garage is redeveloped as part of the Seattle Center Master Plan. When that day comes, we’re hoping to find a new, more permanent P-Patch home somewhere nearby in the neighborhood.
In the meantime, we’ve been busy. Thanks to a Neighborhood Matching Fund (NMF) grant awarded in 2021, volunteers rolled up their sleeves to rebuild our plot walls (so soil stops washing away with the rain), restore beds we lost during construction, and add shade and seating for our members and Uptown neighbors to enjoy.
Making Friends at UpGarden
By Robert Grubbs
I wrote this piece in 2019 when UpGarden was being evicted, but I think it speaks to the need for all P‑Patches.
I went to the garden to clear my head after spending much of the morning trying to figure out how to address our pending eviction. The blue sky and sunshine were a welcome change from the rain and wind that we had been slogging through for the past several days – or was it weeks?
No one else was there, and I was relishing the solitude, going about the work of locating and re-baiting a few rat traps. And then I noticed a woman slowly walking along one of the wide aisles, stopping to look carefully at this flower then another. We made eye contact, nodded, and both went about our business. I had never seen her in the garden before, but she was clearly enjoying an afternoon stroll – much as I was just being there.
Meanwhile, I had located a rat burrow and went to the trailer to get a shovel to “explore” it. The woman had continued her stroll and was now close enough that I greeted her, and we began to talk. Her accent was European, and she was a bit older than I. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, and then she mentioned that she lived nearby and often came up to enjoy the garden.
I told her how glad I was to hear that, but that we had just learned about our pending eviction, so to enjoy it while she could. She said then that she was shocked to hear this and wanted to know what she could do. I told her that we were still trying to determine what to do, but to keep her eyes open for a petition to sign or some other way to lend her support, which she said she would be happy to do. I then introduced myself and learned that her name was Ingrid. I look forward to seeing and talking with her again.
The point of this too lengthy story is that I would have never met this woman if the UpGarden did not exist. I likely would have never met any of my fellow UpGardeners either because the nature of living in a city in multi-family buildings, as many of us do, is to keep to ourselves, nod an acknowledgment, and keep moving.
In a less dense environment, we might have backyards to share with neighbors that we would get to know, but in Uptown/Lower Queen Anne, almost no one has these. And there is no neighborhood park for children to play in or dogs to romp in. If UpGarden ceased to exist, we could point to the loss of produce donated to food banks and the loss of gratification that comes from planting and nurturing our vegetables and flowers, but to me, the biggest loss would be this loss of community and human interaction that being in the garden has afforded me.