What I Witnessed in Seattle’s CHAZ / CHOP Zone

A former Seattleite comes home to see what activists have done with the place.

Barricades are set up to prevent cars from entering the area (pedestrians may enter freely)

UPDATE 6/20: A protester was shot and killed this morning in the CHOP. For realtime updates, I recommend following Omari Salisbury on Twitter.

It was almost midnight when we arrived in the Zone. Exhausted from the day’s journey—it’s a 12-hour drive from our apartment in Berkeley to our old Seattle neighborhood—my partner and I took a late night walk around Cal Anderson, the public park adjacent to the East Precinct from which Seattle Police retreated on June 8. A thrum of distant music reverberated through the air.

We approached the park from the north, navigating through a sea of tents. For us, this was a familiar sight, echoing the encampments that filled the park during the Occupy protests of 2011. As we made our way down to Pine Street, however, we quickly realized that this was utterly unlike anything we had witnessed in the decade and a half that this area was our home. Just beyond the tents are a series of community gardens that have sprung up over the past week, engineered by urban sustainability expert Marcus Henderson. During the day, these gardens were filled with volunteers. Along the southern edge of the park, the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” had been painted on Pine Street in giant, colorful letters, broadcasting their…