How Fun, Exactly, Was This Forest?
This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle Center. We've been there, or through there, a couple of times. Usually it's Bumbershoot time and we're headed to the Sky Church for a show. We may have happened into that arcade once or twice, drawn in by someone rocking the DDR particularly hard. It's a big pile of crap, we've always thought--A dire mis-use and under-use of grade A recreational real estate and generally kind of sad and empty. Everyone will be celebrating this fantastic announcement, we thought. Then we saw Goldie's post bemoaning the news. Then we got a couple of emails with subject lines like "Will the last cool thing leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights" indicating that maybe not everyone was on board with our way of thinking.
Maybe it's that we don't have area kids. Kids probably love the Fun Forest, and it's one of the few Seattle attractions that can even half-jokingly be referred to as "family friendly." More likely, though, it's that we never were an area kid, and so missed out on all the field tripping that likely represented many people's first experiences in the city. Maybe announcing that the Fun Forest is doomed is like announcing that Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe is suddenly too low rent for the water front. Who knows. We're still not that sad to see it go, although we're very curious as to what's going to replace it.
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