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After Teen's Death, a Seattle Icon Confronts a New Label, Nuisance
After Teen’s Death, a Seattle Icon Confronts a New Label, Nuisance
For years, architects and design experts have resisted safety changes at Seattle’s Gas Works Park, but after a teenager died there this summer, his parents want it declared a public nuisance.
Gas Works Park on Lake Union in Seattle. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
By Anna Griffin
Reporting from Seattle
Nov. 28, 2025
On July 10, Mattheis Johnson hopped a bus on a warm summer night to see a pop-up punk rock show at Seattle’s Gas Works Park, a hulking collection of steel towers, tanks and pipes that has become one of the world’s most widely emulated examples of postindustrial landscape design.
His parents felt nervous every time their 15-year-old son asserted his independence, but they also knew he needed adventures. As he left their home in the Ballard neighborhood, his mother called out, “Make good choices.”
Instead, as the concert wound down, Mattheis tried climbing the park towers, shadows of America’s industrial age silhouetted against the skyline of one of its most futuristic cities. He lost his footing, fell 50 feet and died at a nearby hospital — the latest in a long line of severe injuries or deaths involving children and young adults at Gas Works Park.
City leaders have spent decades trying to keep visitors off the park’s structures with man-made and natural barriers, but the climbers have kept coming. More drastic structural changes now under consideration are running headlong into preservationists, architecture buffs and artists who are determined to maintain the park’s structures in their original state.
Mattheis Johnson, 15, died earlier this year after falling from a structure at Gas Works Park.
Mattheis Johnson's family
So the grieving Johnson family, in an end run around the endless debates over architectural intent, are trying a new tack. They want a court to declare the towers a public nuisance.
{snip}
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 29, 2025, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Towering Symbol of Renewal in Seattle Caught in a Debate Over Public Safety. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
For years, architects and design experts have resisted safety changes at Seattle’s Gas Works Park, but after a teenager died there this summer, his parents want it declared a public nuisance.
Gas Works Park on Lake Union in Seattle. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
By Anna Griffin
Reporting from Seattle
Nov. 28, 2025
On July 10, Mattheis Johnson hopped a bus on a warm summer night to see a pop-up punk rock show at Seattle’s Gas Works Park, a hulking collection of steel towers, tanks and pipes that has become one of the world’s most widely emulated examples of postindustrial landscape design.
His parents felt nervous every time their 15-year-old son asserted his independence, but they also knew he needed adventures. As he left their home in the Ballard neighborhood, his mother called out, “Make good choices.”
Instead, as the concert wound down, Mattheis tried climbing the park towers, shadows of America’s industrial age silhouetted against the skyline of one of its most futuristic cities. He lost his footing, fell 50 feet and died at a nearby hospital — the latest in a long line of severe injuries or deaths involving children and young adults at Gas Works Park.
City leaders have spent decades trying to keep visitors off the park’s structures with man-made and natural barriers, but the climbers have kept coming. More drastic structural changes now under consideration are running headlong into preservationists, architecture buffs and artists who are determined to maintain the park’s structures in their original state.
Mattheis Johnson, 15, died earlier this year after falling from a structure at Gas Works Park.
Mattheis Johnson's family
So the grieving Johnson family, in an end run around the endless debates over architectural intent, are trying a new tack. They want a court to declare the towers a public nuisance.
{snip}
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 29, 2025, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Towering Symbol of Renewal in Seattle Caught in a Debate Over Public Safety. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe