A beach? Downtown? Really?

For all the development going up in this city, the project that may most change Seattle is one where a wall was just torn down.

It didn't take the heavy machinery long. But the scraping and digging have given downtown Seattle something it hasn't seen in generations. A beach.

It's tiny, only about 60 feet of pebble-strewn shore. It's easy to miss, especially since it's still marred with truck tracks and construction fences.

What it is, though, is the first physical — and more importantly, symbolic — breach in the miles-long system of seawalls, riprap and piers that separate downtown from Elliott Bay.

The pocket beach is adjacent to Belltown, part of the Olympic Sculpture Park that is scheduled to open in October.

I wandered the site the other day. It's a dusty construction zone, dominated by backhoes and new retaining walls.

Yet it's easy to see how this one park could change Seattle's famously strained relations with the water.

It will be about the only place in all of downtown where you can dip your toe in the sea without first scrambling down piles of quarry rock or dangling from a tourist-trap-filled pier.

People aren't clamoring to bathe in the bay. But Seattle's downtown has become so blocked off from the water that it's startling to suddenly see, hear and feel the sea lapping on an undeveloped shore.

When folks walk that tiny beach, they're going to want one in the middle of the downtown waterfront. Just something to break up the unremitting chain of tacky commercialism there.

The other thing thrilling about the park is the way it manages to join city and water, even though it contains a four-lane arterial — Elliott Avenue — and the BNSF Railway tracks.

The park wisely doesn't try to make the road or tracks go away. There's no budget-busting lid. Instead, you pass over the road and tracks on a descending, Z-shaped pattern of pedestrian bridges. You always feel like you're in a park of sea and mountains and cedar groves. But you're never away from the throb of the city — or, like when I was there, the close-range blast of a train whistle.

The combination feels somehow exactly right. A marriage of Seattle's wilderness beauty and its industrial grit.

People probably expect this park to accelerate our transformation into a sanitized, gated community. It is an art garden, after all, financed by multimillionaires and run by the Seattle Art Museum.

But how precious can an art garden be when you can smell diesel soot from a locomotive?

Some hope that a downtown park that's not afraid of the water will inspire Seattleites to put the Alaskan Way Viaduct in a tunnel.

Maybe it will. The first breach in the wall sometimes brings more tumbling down.

To me, though, Seattle is still unique because it's grungy and gorgeous. It's no stretch to stand in this wonderfully twofold park and conclude we could have our viaduct and a way to get back our waterfront, too.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.