Liberty Park is a public park at Third Ave and Perry St in East Central, Spokane, Washington. It is open daily with entry gratis.
Designed by Kirtland Cutter and adapted by the Olmsted Brothers, the park was once considered one of the finest in Spokane and the wider region, but was dramatically reshaped and transformed when Interstate 90 was built through the park in the 1960s. The interchange connecting I-90 with Washington State Route 290 was built on the land that formerly contained the bulk of the park. Ruins of the former park are visible to drivers as they pass through the interchange, with the contemporary park located on the opposite side of the freeway.
To counter the loss of land taken by the freeway, the park was expanded eastward from its original location. In addition to traditional park features like grass lawns, sports facilities and play equipment, Liberty Park is home to a branch of the Spokane Public Library and an aquatic center.
History
The land that became Liberty Park was gifted to the city of Spokane by wealthy local industrialist F. Lewis Clark in 1897 and its name was chosen a year later by a vote of residents of the neighboring Liberty Place Addition. The original park stretched from Third Ave. in the north to Fifth Ave. in the south and Arthur St. in the west to Perry St. in the east and was home to a country club for wealthy members. The surrounding neighborhood was developed in the 1890s as well as a streetcar suburb for working class people. The wealthy members and the working class residents did not get along well, and the country club was soon moved to another of Spokane's grand early parks, Manito Park.
During the first three years of the park's existence, the city spent $6,000 on road-grading and irrigation projects. Famed Pacific Northwest architect Kirtland Cutter drew up the park's original design plans. In 1908, renowned landscape architects the Olmsted Brothers drew up new design plans for the park, which included adding a stone pergola on the high ground overlooking a lake and the rest of the park grounds. The ruins of that pergola are now located outside of the park, on the other side of I-90, and are sometimes referred to as "Spokane's Stonehenge." Work on the Olmsted Brothers' plan was completed in 1913. The brothers said of Liberty Park at the time that it was "so much broken into hills and valleys with abrupt slopes and prominent projecting ledges that it is capable of uncommonly picturesque landscape gardening development."
Another part of the Olmsted Brothers' plan was to draw children to the park, which made Liberty Park the site of Spokane's first public playground. Other play equipment such as swing sets and wading pools were constructed as well. In 1908, another way the park attempted to draw children was by hiring a "competent and reliable woman" to look after children who were left at the park by the mothers on their way into downtown for shopping. A public pool, one of the city's first, opened in Liberty Park in 1920.
According to Tracy Rebstock with the Washington State Archives, the park's fortunes began to decline around the start of the Great Depression. In 1937, a group of striking workers stole a delivery truck and pushed it off the cliff into the lake below. Maintenance work on the lake had been stopped in the years prior, and the lake had turned into an overgrown swamp. By 1949, a decision was made to fill in the lake entirely with non-burnable waste.
Liberty Park's fortunes took an even bigger blow in the 1950s as plans were being drawn up to bring an interstate highway through Spokane. Four routes were proposed, taking different routes through the city center, but all four divergent proposals converged at or immediately adjacent to Liberty Park. With the park already in decline, and a history of redlining in the surrounding East Central area that had made it one of the most diverse areas of Spokane. As was the case in cities around the region, those conditions made Liberty Park and East Central an obvious location to construct the interstate. Of the park's 21 acres, 18 were destroyed, along with over 1,000 homes in East Central, to make way for the highway.
The new Liberty Park was completed in 1973 with a smaller pond, baseball diamonds, a pavilion, tennis, basketball and horseshoe courts, along with restrooms. Lighting was also installed in an effort to reduce crime and vandalism. A pool was later added to the new park, which was subsequently expanded into an aquatics center in 2010. In 2021, the Liberty Park Library, a branch of the Spokane Public Library, was opened in the park.