Their final breakthrough in conceptualizing the park came while hashing out the design problems at a favorite New York bar, the Odeon. "This took a couple margaritas, actually," Manfredi laughed. Fiddling with one of their business cards, Weiss tore a zigzag shape with a fold at the top right. "It's really this, isn't it?" she said. That simple gesture is the core of their winning design. Yet, making it happen has taken years of hard work and setbacks, frustrating for everybody involved, Manfredi said. "There have been so many hurdles thrown at the project [Remember the viaduct? The trolley barn? The cement strike?] that those of us who were working on it really had to band together."
  
The design created was a continuous constructed landscape for art, forms an uninterrupted Z-shaped "green" platform, and descends 40 feet from the city to the water, capitalizing on views of the skyline and Elliot Bay and rising over the existing infrastructure to reconnect the urban core to the revitalized waterfront. Before construction of the park, over 120,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed. The remaining petroleum contaminated soil is capped by a new landform with over 200,000 cubic yards of clean fill, much of it excavated from the Seattle Art Museum’s downtown expansion project. Local critics weighed in on every aspect of the park's aesthetics. For more visit http://www.historylink.org/File/8130