Terry Pettus Park is a small pocket park located in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle along the shoreline of Lake Union. The park was built in 1970-71 and in 1987, it was dedicated to and named for Terry Pettus (1904-1984), who had been a newspaper reporter, union organizer, and social activist.
In 1958, Pettus moved into a houseboat in the neighborhood. In the 1960s, the city of Seattle planned to expel the Lake Union houseboats from their moorages. The city complained about untreated sewage from houseboats, even though the lake had been polluted for decades by industrial debris and toxins, as well as the city itself which had been dumping sewage into the lake. Pettus organized what is today the Floating Homes Association and encouraged houseboat owners to tax themselves to pay for cleaning up the lake and connecting floating homes to the city sewer system (which at that point was no longer dumping straight into the lake). He went on to help craft Washington's Shoreline Management Act.
Thanks to Terry Pettus' efforts, the floating home community of Seattle is thriving today with more than 700 floating homes and residential houseboats - the largest number of any U.S. city.
** The shoreline and dock of the park are currently closed due to unsafe conditions and there are plans to renovate the park to make them accessible once again. The cache is hidden outside of the fenced off area. I will keep an eye on construction progress and will make sure that the cache can still be reached. **
***Congrats to CalebLiberty on the FTF***
