Woodland Park began as one man's estate. Guy Carleton Phinney, a Canadian-born lumber mill owner and real estate developer, acquired the land that would bear his neighborhood's name. He built a private park on the densely forested acreage between what are now Seattle's Phinney Ridge and Green Lake neighborhoods, planting gardens and constructing amenities that reflected the ambitions of a timber baron in a city still young enough to smell like sawdust. When Phinney died in 1893, his estate lost its patron. The city of Seattle eventually acquired the land, and in 1902, the Olmsted Brothers firm of Boston was hired to transform Phinney's private forest into a public park. The Olmsteds, sons and stepsons of Frederick Law Olmsted who designed Central Park, brought their signature philosophy: parks should feel like nature discovered, not nature imposed.

Aurora Avenue North, also known as State Route 99, slices Woodland Park in two. The western half belongs mostly to the Woodland Park Zoo, one of the oldest zoos on the West Coast. The eastern half, connected to the zoo by arched pedestrian bridges over the highway, is what locals call Lower Woodland Park. It is a sprawling democratic mess of trails, baseball fields, an off-leash dog park, a pitch-and-putt golf course, horseshoe pits, a skate park, and lawn bowling greens. The park spills into Green Lake Park at its eastern edge, creating a continuous swath of green that feels improbably large for a city this dense. On summer evenings, the two parks merge into a single organism of joggers, cyclists, picnickers, and dogs chasing tennis balls into the wrong games.

For a park hemmed in by neighborhoods, Woodland hosts a surprising catalog of wildlife. Western coyotes patrol the wooded areas, occasionally startling joggers at dawn. Barred owls roost in the old conifers, their deep hooting audible from the parking lots. Bald eagles circle overhead, scanning Green Lake for fish. Mountain beavers, those peculiar primitive rodents found only in the Pacific Northwest, tunnel through the underbrush alongside their larger cousins, North American beavers, who work the park's waterways. Coypus, the invasive South American rodents also known as nutria, have established themselves here too. The bird list alone reads like a field guide excerpt: Anna's hummingbirds, Steller's jays, spotted towhees, northern flickers, and dozens more. Released red-eared slider turtles bask on logs in the park's ponds, a living reminder that people keep acquiring pets they cannot keep.

The Harding memorial tells a strange, layered story. The president's 1923 visit to Seattle was part of a grueling cross-country tour that had already left him visibly exhausted. His speech to the Boy Scouts at Woodland Park was rousing enough to merit a memorial two years later, complete with two life-sized bronze statues of scouts saluting Harding's image. But by 1977, the memorial had fallen out of favor. It was demolished, and the zoo's expansion swallowed the site. The bronze scouts survived, relocated to the headquarters of the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America, where they continue their eternal salute to a president whose memory has largely faded. It is a fitting metaphor for Woodland Park itself: a place where layers of history accumulate, get paved over, and occasionally resurface in unexpected forms.