the area. Schwagerl's most recognized contribution to Seattle was development of a comprehensive plan for Seattle parks that he said, "provides for a system of attenuated parks and boulevards. It embraces four main parks, each park consisting of a natural project of peerless scope, breadth and range at the four corners, as it were, of the city." The four sites he identified include three modern-day parks, Seward Park, Discovery Park, and Magnuson Park, as well as Alki Point. He envisioned a "continuous boulevard, from 150 to 300 feet wide," encircling the city, which would branch off into smaller boulevards and parks. Despite the plan receiving enthusiastic support from the mayor and park commissioners, the city's financial difficulties caused by the ongoing recovery from the Great Seattle Fire and the Panic of 1893 meant no immediate progress was made. In 1895, Schwagerl was retained to design the site of the Whatcom Normal School (now Western Washington University). He resigned his position as superintendent, effective at the end of 1895, and moved back to Tacoma to take up a position at Puget Sound University. His job was to design its permanent campus at University Place along with surrounding residential tracts, whose sale was supposed to fund the campus project. However, several years of financial trouble around servicing the debt on the project meant the campus was never built at University Place, which today is a purely residential area. Schwagerl returned to private practice in Seattle thereafter, and in 1906 was asked to develop the new Mount Baker Addition along with George F. Cotterill, as part of the Olmsted Brothers' citywide park system that had been initiated in 1903. Among the designs Schwagerl contributed were those for Mount Baker Park. Legacy When John C. Olmsted was brought to Seattle to implement a citywide parks system in 1903, he had sharp criticism of Schwagerl's work, writing to his wife of Denny Park: “His walks are very crooked often and his banks steep and high and his plantings very mixed but pretty much the same selection for every place." His opinion of Schwagerl's talents were summed up with: "[He] seems to be no very considerable artist in his line." The Olmsted Brothers liked Schwagerl's work in Kinnear Park and left it relatively unchanged. Seattle's city engineer R. H. Thomson said the final Olmsted plan was "almost identical" to the one Schwagerl had proposed ten years