Life and Times in Leschi

The Army Camp: A Researcher’s Odyssey Part 1

Before the present-day Powell Barnett Park in Leschi was acquired by Seattle’s park department, it was school district property. It was originally intended as the site of a junior high school. That never happened, and the location was eventually used as a running track for athletes at Garfield High School, which is four blocks away.

By the late 1950s, the area had the look of an abandoned lot. My brothers and I, growing up not far away in Madrona, played there and explored the little caves on the hillside. The area had fallen into disuse by the school and, after the district offered it to the park department, that agency made some use of it even before acquiring title.

What was then known as the “East Garfield Playfield,” sometimes referred to as “Temple Place” (from the street’s former name) was declared surplus in March 1964 and transferred from the school district to the city in February 1966, in part because of the inconvenience of crossing the new expressway, Empire Way (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way).

While researching the life story of Powell Barnett, I became acquainted with his granddaughter, Maisha Barnett, who was instrumental in the renovation of the park in 2006 and has remained a guardian of the park’s quality. She mentioned to me that the location had been an “army camp” during World War II, though she had little detail about it. During the renovation, an official from the Parks Department told her that he had heard from one of the workers about a vault in the ground near the south end of the park. No details about that have emerged. However, a Japanese American woman who grew up on Alder Street across from the park told me that her mother cautioned children not to play in that area, because someone had fallen through into an underground void.

I raised the question of the military camp with the downtown library’s Seattle Room staff, who came up with the following interesting tidbit: In the collection of essays Women and War in the Twentieth Century (1999), the article “The Silent Significant Minority” references an army camp at the Garfield track field. In that piece, author Ivy Arai (now Tabbara) relates a 1996 interview with Sally Sakai Tsutsumoto, who was born in 1930. Sally grew up on the 200 block of 28th Avenue, just south of the park. Ivy writes, “Many Japanese-Americans felt uncertain about their future, so families moved in together. Several families living in one home created a base so everyone could evacuate together. While Japanese Americans isolated themselves within their homes, military troops established stations to monitor Japanese activity. In Seattle, the military converted the Garfield High School track field into a temporary army camp.

Intrigued, I began to look for more information about the army installation. I tracked down the author, Ivy Tabbara. She had not saved notes or a recording of her interview with Sally Tsutsumoto. Then I started looking for traces of Sally. She would be about 94 years old, and I doubted she was still alive. A search of Seattle newspapers turned up nothing about the army camp. I consulted Seattle’s Smithsonian-affiliated Wing Luke Museum, which focuses on the culture, history, and art of Asian Americans. From there I was referred to Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project, which has a massive archive of interviews with Japanese Americans who were incarcerated after Pearl Harbor.

A digital search of the archives for keywords produced nothing about the encampment. The local office of the National Archives referred me to the main collection at headquarters in Washington, DC, which pointed me to its military archives in Columbia, Maryland.

The Seattle city archives steered me to the school district. Archivists at the school district headquarters were most cooperative. The collection includes the minutes of school board meetings and correspondence of the superintendents. All of it is exquisitely indexed by topic on 3x5 cards. There are plenty of hits for Garfield High School, but not a one for Army. I visited the office and read through all the board minutes from 1939 to 1941, along with all the superintendent’s correspondence for the same period. Still nothing useful. I was puzzled. It would seem that the use of school property by the Army must have been discussed and authorized at some high level in the district.

Then I got back to Maisha Barnett. She wrote me, “Basically any Black Seattleite over the age of 60 knew the park as Army Camp. All of my older siblings, parents, neighbors, elders in the community, and random Black folk all called it Army Camp.”

I thought I’d try that out on a couple of Garfield grads I know. Both African Americans, they had been students there in the early 1960s. I vaguely described what I was curious about, not wanting to lead them on, and each one, at about the same point in the conversations, said, “Oh, you mean the army camp.”

Both had been athletes and had run on the track. But their presence there had been 20 years after the fact, and neither had an idea of why they called it that. I later learned from a Parks Department project manager that, when the park was being renovated, people he talked to in the neighborhood also referred to the army camp.

Next month: A deep dive into Army archives.

~Roger Lippman

The author writes monthly about Leschi history and his experiences over his 48 years in the neighborhood.