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Pritchard Island Beach Toy Theater 2022
This kinetic toy theater is up until October 9th at Pritchard Island Beach Park in Rainier Beach, Seattle.
This piece has two movements - The first is operated by a foot treadle depicts the lowering of Lake Washington in 1917 when the Ship Canal at the Ballard Locks went in and the lake lowered 9 feet. This engineered event turned Pritchard Island into a marshland instead of an island. The second movement is a hand spun disc that shows different dwellings that have been on the island through time. The island was called Tleelh-chus (or little Island) when the Duwamish had a small village there. At the begining of the 1900's Alfred J Pritchard bought land on the island with gold rush money and built a series of houses there, at the time it was accessed by a row boat. Today the little one street community has houses built after the island became part of Rainer Beach geographically when the lake lowered, to get to it you bisect a marshland that connects Pritchard Island Beach park to Beer Shiva park.
This project is installed on Duwamish Land. They are still not a federally recognized tribe, although the city of Seattle is on their land. If you would like to lend your voice to the movement to correct this please visit
https://www.duwamishtribe.org
special thanks to Rob Lutz for all the engineering help along the way. this piece would not be nearly as elegant without his input!
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