By MICHAEL BARBER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Licton Springs' underlying neighborhood identity always returns to its environmental riches.

North Seattle Community College cares for a fairly significant wetlands wildlife preserve on its northern boundary, which serves as the headwaters to the Thornton Creek watershed, with more than 100 species of birds.

"We take it pretty seriously, not only because of the environmental issues, but because so many residents are concerned and conscious of its importance," said the college's Rickey.

Ryals said she hopes the city considers "daylighting" the now-buried springs, opening them up and bordering them with native plants as part of $1 million for improvements to the Wilson Pacific athletic fields.

Then there's Pilling's Pond, where 87-year-old Charles Pilling achieved international fame raising wild and exotic water fowl. In 1955, he made ornithological history as the first to breed a pair of diving ducks called hooded mergansers.

Pilling, born in 1911 and raised in the house on North 90th Street in which he still lives, has seen more changes than most. As a kid, Pilling delivered the Post-Intelligencer on horseback and milked cows.

Neighbors now want to figure out a way to manage the popular pond once Pilling can't manage it anymore.

In 1953, Post-Intelligencer columnist Frank Lynch interviewed Lawrence Lindsley, the last living grandson of pioneer David Denny, about the spring. Lynch lamented that the "oasis in a new home and shopping area . . . seems to have ceased to awe our citizens at all."

Lindsley recalled how Denny loved the area so much he eventually moved there year round. A mama bear once was seen bringing her cubs to the spring, and timber was "so thick and so tall that sometimes they had difficulty getting the kitchen stove to draw."

But Denny was saddened as progress blurred the spring's attraction, as memories began to fade of the hundreds of people who sought them out by foot, horse, coach and buggy.

Today, Licton Springs is like "a little city, but the borders have always been so fuzzy, so it's hard to define," said David Quiring Jr., owner of local business Quiring Monuments. While that has hampered creation of an identity, recent efforts by the community, merchants and city officials to improve the park, and toss a first ever community picnic in September, are signs of life, he said.

In that way, residents and merchants say, the springs and their mineral waters continue to exercise their ancient healing powers, bringing people together around them.