Aubrey Davis Park: The I-90 Lid on Mercer Island

On Mercer Island, a stretch of Interstate 90 runs under a park. Aubrey Davis Park is a park lid, a structure built over a freeway. It covers 2,800 feet of I-90 between West Mercer Way and 76th Avenue Southeast. It was once called the Mercer Island Lid, and locally the Park on the Lid. The City of Mercer Island runs it, and it is open all year. [1][2]

The park exists because of a fight over the freeway. Building the new I-90 corridor in the late 1970s caused extensive disruption on the island's north end. Aubrey Davis and his wife, Henrietta, had moved to Mercer Island in 1960. He served on the city council from 1967 to 1978 and was mayor from 1970 to 1974. [2]

Davis was the principal negotiator of what became the 1976 Interstate 90 Memorandum of Agreement. He demanded that the state redesign the highway around its impact on the island. His signature line about the freeway was blunt: 'We don't want to see it. We don't want to hear it. We don't want to smell it.' [2]

The design that came out of it turned the corridor into landscaped parks and walking paths beside the expanded freeway. The lid itself was built to lessen the freeway's impact and opened to the public in the 1990s. In July 2013 the city held a dedication renaming the Park on the Lid in his honor, at the park on S.E. 22nd Street by the tennis courts. [1][2]

The lid is the centerpiece of something larger. The City of Mercer Island describes Aubrey Davis Park as 92 acres of highway lids and landscape buffers inside a 2.8-mile-long recreation and transportation corridor, built in 1992 to soften the reconstruction of I-90. Besides the Park on the Lid, it takes in the Mountains to Sound Trail, a boat launch and the Greta Hackett Outdoor Sculpture Gallery. [3]

The ground underneath is unusual too. The park sits in right-of-way and airspace owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation. In the late 1980s the city and WSDOT signed agreements that let the city build recreation facilities in the highway corridor and take over their upkeep. In the early 1990s the two signed 40-year airspace leases for the lids. In 2019 they drew up a master plan for the park's long-term future, so the state still owns the land the city runs as a park. [3]

If you drive I-90 across Mercer Island, you pass beneath it. The highway disappears under the lid between West Mercer Way and 76th Avenue Southeast. [1]