Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park occupies a sloping nine-acre site that reaches down to the water's edge along Elliott Bay. It has views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. It has wild grasses, quaking aspens and a salmon habitat on the shoreline. It has a fountain by Louise Bourgeois, an Alexander Calder, a couple of Mark di Suveros and one of Richard Serra's virtuoso exercises in rusted steel. It also has freight trains.
What I mean is, every half an hour or so, a clanging, whistling length of rolling stock rumbles through on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks that...