Project Details Page

synopsis

Albert C. Frost, a mining and real estate developer, hired the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a subdivision plan for the Jefferson Park Tract in about 1924. James Frederick Dawson, a landscape architect with the firm who did extensive work in Seattle, designed several preliminary plans for the subdivision, which was never developed.

Albert C. Frost, a mining and real estate developer, hired the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a subdivision plan for the Jefferson Park Tract in about 1924. James Frederick Dawson, a landscape architect with the firm who did extensive work in Seattle, designed several preliminary plans for the subdivision, which was never developed.

The Jefferson Park Tract encompassed land adjacent to the Jefferson Park Golf Course, bordered on the north by S. Andover Street, on the east by Lexington Place S. and 33rd Avenue S. and the south by S. Alaska St. Cheasty Boulevard, part of the Olmsted park and boulevard system, bisects the northern half of the tract.

Dawson explored several options for the subdivision. One, shown in Preliminary Plan dated March 17 1925 (07399-07), included a 9-hole golf course with a clubhouse and 101 lots, many of which fronted on the course. Another, shown in Preliminary Plan dated April 27, 1925 (07399-10), arranged lots along curving drives on the hillside and straighter streets in the valley near Empire Way (later Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard). The plan incorporated a plaza in the middle of Empire Way just north of Columbian Way with a median feature indicated. Twelve lots in the northwestern corner of the tract backed up to the Jefferson Park Golf Course.

Frost did not file an Olmsted Brothers-designed plat for the Jefferson Park Tract and the hillside portion of the tract was later acquired by the City of Seattle and is now part of the Cheasty Greenspace under Seattle Parks and Recreation.

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