Robert Delaware spotted a mystery at Gas Works Park: a fenced off area with an “Access Restricted” sign: “Due to the ongoing presence of tar, access to this site is restricted.”
Tar? Really? Like La Brea Tar, or like street tar?
The sign said to call David Graves at Seattle Parks and Recreation for more information, so call him, we did.
Now, as anyone familiar with Wallingford history knows, Gas Works Park is so named for the gas plant, tar refinery and incinerator that used to sit on that land. The City of Seattle bought the site from Washington Natural Gas (which later become Puget Sound Energy) in 1962 and opened it as a park in 1975.
Of course, when you’ve got all that nastiness boiling there for so long, it’s tough to clean up. The top-layer of soil (down about a foot and a half) was removed and replaced, but what’s under that is the same hazardous, toxic material that the gas plant was generating for half a century.
According to David, when the weather turns hot, sometimes fingers of leftover tar bubbles up to the surface. Usually, the Washington State Department of Ecology will come in and just dig it up, pack it into a barrel and ship it away to destinations elsewhere, but in this case, the tar bubbled up around the roots of a birch tree on the shoreline. The only way to extract the tar would be to remove the tree, and, it being a perfectly good tree (with the exception of the tar-encrusted roots), they decided to leave it. Not wanting people to sit on it, the fenced it off.
David assured us that it’s not dangerous per se (although he did suggest that we refrain from eating it).
While we were on the subject, David mentioned that while the “uplands” area of Gas Works (everything you can walk on) has been “mitigated” (covered in safer dirt), the sediments (high water mark on out into the lake) have not. The city and PSE are working on a remedy plan (likely some sort of cap, such as soil, sand or concrete) but that at this point, they were still just putting together a Remedial Investigation Feasibility Study (RIFS), the draft of which is due out some time next year.
And what about the birch tree? The fence will remain in place for the foreseeable future, as the city isn’t interested in removing it, and there is no other way to remove the tar.
Don’t sit there.
This title is deeply offensive. I’m sure you could have come up with a more creative title for an article on tar than to make a play on words with racially offensive slur.
That fencing isn’t super new – it’s been there several months, maybe six? I walk the dogz past there all the time; never noticed any tar, though.
– r
The only place I’ve encountered the term “tar baby” in my life was in a children’s story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_baby
There doesn’t appear to be anything particularly offensive about it, or anything racially bigoted in the term’s origins. Offense can be taken about anything, but it’s not necessarily worth the effort.
It appears that when you play with words you are playing with fire . . . I appreciate the clever story titles myself and note that there is a comma here between “tar” and “baby” . . .
The only time I have heard the term is in a chorus for this song:
i like the clever titles too. keep up the good work.
@ nina. New to the ‘hood are we? Please lighten up a little, I like to think we’re less judgemental hereabouts. Actively seeking out any phrase that could possibly construed as a racial offense, particularly in the context of this blog, serves nobody. Better to save the ‘deeply offended’ for deliberately harmful comments.
Too bad the tar baby story got tarred in the advancement of a political agenda, it really is a cute story with a worthwhile message.
Like Kevin, throughout my entire life I’ve only heard the term “tar baby” used to refer, in reference to the Uncle Remus story, to “something that once you touch it, you can’t get away from”. It’s surprising to me to hear that it is also used as a racial epithet. Nina and others, I’m sorry if the use of the term hurt people’s feelings.
I would hate for bigots to be able to “claim” this great and useful term. I don’t think they should be allowed to cause it to be off-limits to the rest of us through their use of it.
Nina isn’t alone finding the term offensive. I have heard others express offense at the term, and when I googled “tar baby,” the third link was this TIME article, Why “Tar Baby” Is Such a Sticky Phrase: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1221764,00.html
Just because words or phrases have been used for a long time, does not mean those words do not carry a complicated history and have different connotations to different people. In the end, we all make our own decisions on what is objectionable or not.