In 1974 Seattle officials decided to demolish the International Fountain at Seattle Center. It was too expensive, they said, too difficult to maintain. But a thirteen-year-old girl named Susan Park thought otherwise. She organized hundreds of schoolchildren who wrote letters in defense of the fountain. Their voices, together with those of immigrant families who saw the fountain as a symbol of their place in the city, changed everything. This is the story of how children and overlooked communities stopped the bulldozers and taught Seattle a new way to decide its future.
The Fountain That Was Supposed to Disappear
After the 1962 World’s Fair, Seattle Center had become an ordinary park. The Space Needle stood as a monument to the past, and the city didn’t know what to do with the large buildings and strange structures left behind after the celebration. The International Fountain — a huge metal bowl with water jets that danced to music — seemed especially useless to city officials.
The fountain broke down every month. Pumps failed, pipes leaked, and in winter everything froze. In 1974 the city council calculated: repairs would cost $200,000. That was a huge sum for a city that had just suffered a crisis when Boeing laid off tens of thousands of workers. “We can’t spend money on a toy,” one official said at a council meeting.
The plan was simple: fill the fountain bowl with dirt, plant grass, and turn the space into a regular lawn. The decision was to be made in two months. But nobody asked the people who came to the fountain every day.
Susan’s Notebook and an Army of Schoolchildren
Susan Park lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and every Saturday she went to Seattle Center with her younger brother. They brought sandwiches, sat on the edge of the fountain, and watched the water jets rise ten meters into the air, changing shape to different music. Sometimes the fountain played classical music and the water moved slowly like a ballerina. Sometimes it played rock, and the jets leapt like at a concert.
When Susan learned about the demolition plan from the newspaper her father read at breakfast, she didn’t believe it. “They can’t do that,” she said. But her father explained that they could if nobody objected. So Susan took a school notebook and began to write.
Her first letter went to the mayor. She wrote about how the fountain made the city special, how it brought people from different countries together, how children learned about music just by watching the water. She ended with a question: “If we can’t keep beautiful things, what kind of city are we building?”
Then she went to her school and asked her teacher for permission to speak at an assembly. She told her classmates about the fountain and suggested: everyone should write a letter. The teacher supported the idea and even set aside a class period for letter writing. Susan went from class to class, from school to school. In three weeks she collected 347 letters from children.
“The fountain is where I feel happy,” nine-year-old Emily wrote. “My grandfather brought me here when I came from Korea and told me this is a fountain for all the people of the world,” wrote eleven-year-old Min Ji. Children wrote about birthday parties at the fountain, about their older siblings’ first dates, about how pleasant it was to sit there on a hot day.
Voices That Hadn’t Been Heard Before
But Susan was not alone. In those same weeks people who had rarely been seen at city council meetings began to appear. Families from the International District’s Chinatown, Japanese immigrants, Filipino workers, Korean shop owners — they all came to meetings and asked for the fountain to be kept.
For them the fountain meant more than a pretty spectacle. The 1962 World’s Fair had been called the “Century 21 Exposition” and promised a future where all peoples would be equal. The International Fountain was a symbol of that promise. It was built as a meeting place of cultures, where water jets moved to music from different countries — from Japanese drums to Indian sitars.
“When I bring my children here,” Thomas Lee, a restaurant owner in Chinatown, said at a council meeting, “I show them that this city is ours too. The fountain says: there is a place for everyone here. If you remove it, what will you tell us?”
These voices rarely featured in discussions about the future of Seattle Center. After the fair, planning had mostly been done by white architects and officials who saw the area as empty space for new projects. They did not understand that for many immigrant families Seattle Center had already become an important place, one of the few in the city where they felt like welcomed guests rather than outsiders.
The campaign to save the fountain united these communities with activists, university students, and, of course, children. For the first time in Seattle Center debates, people who usually did not speak to one another sat at the same table.
The Meeting That Changed Everything
On April 15, 1974 the city council was scheduled to vote. The chamber was packed. Susan arrived with a huge box full of letters. She asked to speak and began reading them aloud, one by one. After each letter she paused so the council members could reflect.
“I know repairs are expensive,” she said at the end. “But we, the children, are willing to help. We can raise money, clean the fountain, take care of it. Just give us a chance.” Then she pulled an envelope from her pocket: the students had collected $127 from their pocket money and wanted to donate it toward repairs.
Councilmember Sam Smith, who had previously supported demolition, called for a recess. When the meeting resumed, he said: “I never thought we were deciding only about a fountain. We are deciding what kind of city we will leave to these children. I am changing my mind.”
The vote was five to two in favor of keeping the fountain. The city allocated money for repairs, but also created a special fund where people could make donations. Within a year $89,000 was raised — nearly half the needed amount. The rest came from the city.
But the most important change was not to the fountain but to how Seattle made decisions. The city council adopted a new rule: for any changes at Seattle Center public hearings must be held and representatives of different communities, including youth, must be invited. For the first time the voices of children and immigrant families became part of the official planning process.
The Fountain That Taught the City to Listen
Today the International Fountain is one of Seattle’s most popular spots. Every summer thousands of children run through its jets, and in the evenings families gather there from across the city. The fountain has been repaired several times, new music programs were added, and modern pumps installed. But its main value is not technological.
The story of saving the fountain changed how Seattle thinks about its public spaces. The city learned that places like Seattle Center belong not only to architects and officials but to ordinary people who come there every day. Especially to those whose voices had previously been unheard: children, immigrants, low-income families.
Susan Park grew up to become an architect. She designs parks and plazas, and she always asks children what they want to see in their neighborhoods. “That fountain taught me that a city is made not only by adults with degrees,” she says. “It’s made by everyone who lives in it. Even thirteen-year-old girls with notebooks.”
In 2012, for the fiftieth anniversary of the World’s Fair, a small plaque was placed at the edge of the fountain. It reads: “Saved by the voices of the community, 1974.” It’s a short phrase, but behind it is an important story about what happens when a city begins to listen to all its residents, not just the loudest or wealthiest. And about how sometimes the most important ideas come from those who are still in school and carrying letters in a cardboard box.
