From Schoolyard to Playground
The ground beneath your feet here has a long tie to the school next door. Cedar Park Elementary School stands at NE 135th Street and 37th Avenue NE, and the playground sits on its west side, right where students once spent recess.
The school's unusual story
Cedar Park Elementary first opened its doors to neighborhood children in 1956. Falling enrollment across Seattle's schools, and especially in this area, led to its closing in 1981, though the city held on to the land and buildings and simply stopped using them as a school.
The building then found a second life when it was leased to an artists' community called Artwood Studios. The artists stayed for 32 years, so the building housed studios longer than it ever housed classrooms. In 2013, with enrollment shifting again, the school reopened.
Cedar Park Elementary came back as an option school built around expeditionary learning, a nontraditional approach to curriculum. Most neighborhood children are assigned elsewhere by default, to John Rogers Elementary, Jane Addams Middle School and Nathan Hale High School.
The Neighborhood Around You
The playground shares its name with the surrounding neighborhood, a residential slice of Lake City that runs east of the commercial core toward Lake Washington. That name traces back to plats that divided former Puget Mill Company land along the lakeshore in the 1920s.
Building came slowly at first, and from the 1920s until World War II many lots overlooking the lake held vacation cottages. After 1945 the area filled in as a single-family community, which is why so many homes you pass date from the 1950s through the 1970s. The neighborhood joined Seattle in 1954, when the city limits moved north to 145th Street.
Exactly where the neighborhood begins and ends is still debated. The Cedar Park Neighborhood Council represents a broader area running east from 35th Avenue NE to the lake, between NE 120th and NE 145th Streets, and the Burke-Gilman Trail passes through it along the Lake Washington shoreline. Dig deeper in our Cedar Park neighborhood guide.
Easy Walks Nearby
Several small parks and local landmarks sit within about half a mile, measured in a straight line:
- Cedar Park Elementary School, right beside the playground
- Barksdale House, a local landmark about 0.3 miles away
- Lake City Court Garden, a community garden about 0.4 miles away
- Little Brook Park, about 0.5 miles away
- Lake City Memorial Triangle, Lake City Mini Park and University Lake Shore Place, each about 0.6 miles away
- Lake City Branch of the library, about 0.6 miles away
Pair your playground time with a library stop or a visit to one of the other pocket parks for an easy neighborhood loop. When you are ready for more green spaces across the city, browse our guide to all parks in Seattle.
