The Mini Mart City Park is a pocket park, public sculpture, experimental exhibition space and environmental remediation project. We will design, construct, plant and maintain a public green space around the former Perovich Bros. Gas Station in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. The existing structure will be seismically retrofit and remodeled into a multi-purpose space available to the community.
This multifaceted project is blurring the boundaries between art, architecture, environmental activism and green design. We will transform the space both visually and functionally. Mini-Mart City Park is a vision of what happens when the urban landscape is given back to nature, and the community that inhabits it. The structure will keep its identity as a corner convenience store, but be converted into not only a truly “green” building, but a living work of art. This sculpture will provide a potential new model for public parks.
The project’s home, 6525 Ellis Ave S, in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle is a vacant corner lot with a derelict, condemned building. A gas station built in the early 30’s; Perovich Bros. stored fuel for Boeing Field during WWII. Two 20-thousand gallon tanks were stored in the back of the lot in addition to the standard tanks under the pumps in the front of the station. It survived as a family owned gas station until it went out of business in the 70’s due to the Arab Oil Embargo. It then became a drycleaners, further lending to the soil’s toxicity. The building has been sporadically occupied since the mid 80’s and vacant for the last 3 years.
This project is a prototype for what we hope will become an eco-arts franchise. There are over 700 former gas stations abandoned in the Puget Sound region alone and over 200,000 nationwide. With world oil supplies dwindling, we will no doubt be we seeing these numbers increase in the future. We view this project as a creative means to address issues like energy, waste, and environmental stewardship; tensions between open space and development, notions of public versus private land, and art and the community.
