Lion's Park

Around 1990, Bremerton engaged Wolf Bauer to rethink this stretch of shoreline on the northeast side of Port Washington Narrows. I don't recall details, but I believe they cleaned out old rubble shore protection and added gravel to create a narrow low energy beach. At the time it got quite a bit of attention and I think I still have a video (VHS, not YouTube) done by the city with Wolf explaining the project.

AERIAL VIEW

A few years ago the City went back and remodeled the park again. There's still some older industrial history - left either because it was too messy or too expensive to undo or too important historically to remove - but most of the shoreline is a pleasant mix of gravel beach and fringing marsh.

This is one of those sites where the wave energy is right on the threshold of that necessary to maintain an active beach, so this mosaic of marsh and beach is to be expected (and may shift over time).

This is a soft shoreline project that hasn't gotten much attention that I'm aware of outside the local community - but probably should. Puget Sound is a huge landscape and there are an awful lot of cool projects going on that show that seawalls aren't the only way to manage a shoreline. It's hard to track all of them. One of our challenges is how to better document these. Maybe something less demanding than scientific monitoring but more rigorous than a casual blog!