Jimi Hendrix
photo via @lindabcool

Jimi Hendrix Park opened in Seattle

Monterey Pop’s 50th anniversary festival wasn’t the only Summer of Love celebration going on this past weekend. Jimi Hendrix, who played the original Monterey (and famously lit his guitar on fire), had a park named after him open in his former hometown of Seattle. Jimi Hendrix Park was actually christened back in 2006, the NY Times reports, but it didn’t open until this past Saturday (6/17) “after a decade of permit delays and financial woes.”

Here are some more details on the park, via the Times article:

The sculpture, which doubles as a shade structure over a performance stage, sits at the center of a spiraling sidewalk that resembles a guitar when viewed aerially. At 12 points on the sidewalk, along what would be frets on a guitar neck, plaques embedded in the concrete narrate Hendrix’s life. The lyrics from his songs “Little Wing” and “Angel” are etched along the walkway’s edge, forming a purple ribbon. Cedar saplings, a nod to Hendrix’s Cherokee heritage, mingle with paulownias, which will eventually bloom purple flowers.

…Now a grassy expanse dotted with flowering plants and tree saplings, Jimi Hendrix Park was a parking lot fronting a derelict elementary school until 2003, when a city-funded program tore up the asphalt. Activists occupied the shuttered building in 1985, eventually staying for eight years and demanding that it become a black history museum. Fund-raising and infighting dragged out the creation of the Northwest African American Museum, which finally opened in 2008. The museum’s founding executive director, Carver Gayton, first proposed that a Jimi Hendrix Park be added.

Check out some more pics below.

Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love (#18) and Are You Experienced (#10) both made our new list of the 50 best psychedelic rock albums of the Summer of Love.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVcyHSql6Os/?tagged=jimihendrixpark

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVeORYIDcBK/