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The new privacy fencing installed at the city’s gay nude beach, Denny Blaine Park, is Exhibit A of Seattle’s favorite civic pastime: do-nothing, performative solutions.
As of yesterday, a chain link fence with green plastic lining divides the park—the product of an injunction from King County Superior Court requiring the city to come up with a ’batin “abatement” plan to dissuade lewd acts and “nudity as constituted” at the park.
Denny Blaine Park is naturally divided into three levels, divided by two sets of stairs that descend to the beach. The retaining wall adjacent to the first staircase already obscures most angles from street level and the lawn. The fence, which extends about four feet on top of the retaining wall, effectively blocks off the east area. The fence is the dividing line. Nudity is okay on the beach side east of the fence, but not okay on the street side west of it.
A spokesperson for the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation wrote in an email that two of these zones will be clothing optional, and that the department will post the park’s hours and code of conduct on the fence.
The fence has only been in place for a day, but Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reports someone has already tried to tear it down (the Seattle Police Department did not respond to a request for comment).
And besides looking like shit, advocates for the park say the fence doesn’t prevent the acts of public masturbation, sex, and harassment that do happen in the park.
“It does diddly jack shit,” says Colleen Kimseylove, a co-lead of Friends of Denny Blaine Park (FDBP), the park stewardship advocating for the park’s use as a nude beach. “I think there’s an argument to be made that it makes the situation worse.”
For the nearly two years that the fight over this beach has stretched on, beachgoers have repeatedly told The Stranger that creeps exist, and masturbation happens, but not anywhere near as often as neighbors say it does. Decreasing visibility could change that.
For anyone engaging in lewd or dangerous behavior, Kimseylove says, “if you put up a fence, it really is like, ‘Oh, hi. Here’s a nice extended feature that makes it harder for anybody to see what I’m doing.’”
Nudity is legal in Seattle. Instead of installing a fence, said Sophie Amity Debs, another FDBP co-lead, the city should be making stronger arguments in support of residents’ First Amendment rights.
“The neighbors have asserted that nudity is illicit, against the code of conduct, and that it is actively contributing to criminal activity,” she said via text. “The city, so far, has effectively ceded these concerns, and simply said that they are choosing not to enforce and they have the right to do that.”
King County Superior Court Judge Samuel S. Chung did find, in his injunction, that “nudity as constituted” represented a nuisance to nearby property owners. Instead of pushing back on that, the city opted to try to shunt beachgoers out of sight. But that won’t work, Amity Debs argued.
“The zones and this bizarre fence were not in any way necessary or required by the injunctive order,” she said. “[E]ven the judge sounded extremely skeptical of them being useful in any fashion.”
Dividing the park into clothed and nude zones has never been a hit with beachgoers, who shut down the idea at a public meeting last year. Not even the irate neighbors like this fence. In a July 28 statement to KIRO 7 news, Denny Blaine Park for All, the group behind the lawsuit that led to the injunction that led to the abatement plan, said the plan failed to address “ongoing illegal activity.” Denny Blaine Park for All did not respond to a request for comment.
The city settled on a solution both sides openly hate. Why?
Callie Craighead, press secretary for Mayor Bruce Harrell, wrote in an email that, “the fencing and visual barrier were put up in accordance with a court-ordered plan submitted by the City related to nuisance behavior at Denny Blaine Park.”
A spokesperson for Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR), Rachel Schulkin, sent almost the exact same sentence.
Asked to elaborate on how the fence would combat the nuisance behaviors described in the injunction, Schulkin stated, “The fence obscures views into the park.”
Schulkin did not offer any comment on how the fence would prevent indecent activity on the beach itself.
Rather than being a solution that will satisfy the injunction, Kimseylove fears that the fence itself will become a nuisance, attracting conflict and vandalism, and land the city right back in court.
“It feels like we’re being set up to have issues happen with this fence and have neighbors come back to the courts and say, ‘Oh, they can’t even respect a fence,’” they said. “[It’s] almost like a deliberate provocation to gather more evidence that Denny Blaine is Sodom and Gomorrah on the shores of Lake Washington.”
