Ravennawards

Dear Diary,

Something momentous seems to have happened recently, dear Diary, but I greatly fear it's been done all wrong.  It's also partly old news.  I think I should start at the beginning.

Which is a correction I forgot to include in my errata page a few days ago.  Do you remember...

Ravenna Park I

I claimed a plastic stall door in the men's room of Ravenna Park's lower men's room was new, and probably put there because vandals had wrecked the old metal door.

Well, the door could perhaps be new, but the graffiti on it aren't; I recognised several from last summer:

Hope they're visible in those shots.  They're upside down; that much, anyway, has changed since they were made.

I've warned you, dear Diary, about my unreliable memory, and this is an excellent example.

So anyway, this past weekend, I needed to do Number Two in the late afternoons, which meant trips to Ravenna Park.  I decided not to stress the damaged cart with these trips; on Sunday I anyway brought my backpack, but Saturday and Monday not even that.  I decided to use these excursions to visit also the smaller parks more or less near Ravenna, of which there are four.  On Saturday I began with

Ravenna Woods

Two streets lead south from the western end of the lower part of Ravenna Park.  The eastern is Ravenna Place, the western Ravenna Avenue.

Well, if you follow the Avenue south past the dead end notice all the way to 47th St, you reach Ravenna Woods.  Like Inverness Ravine Park, this one lacks the usual signage (as, in fact, do all four of these), but unlike both that park and Thornton Creek Natural Area (EDIT 10/19 Chinook Passage Natural Area), Ravenna Woods has a clearly laid out, gravel, path.  

This continues Ravenna Avenue south to 45th St; just south of the overpass, the woods continue but the path becomes wood chips and makes a sharp right turn.

I remember a miserable night or two, years ago, of verifying that none of these trails lead acceptably back to the street system.

In looking for parks' restrooms and water fountains, I assume they're meant to be found.  Magnuson Park's central restroom is on a gravel path, but it's a path central to the park.  Or to put it another way, plumbing that nobody can find is effectively nonexistent.

There's no visible plumbing on the gravel path, and I don't see the point in checking wood chip trails at all.

I was, therefore, unhappily familiar with these woods, but although they're a terrible way to get somewhere, they aren't such a bad destination in their own right.

I was rather more familiar with a place further north on Ravenna Avenue, where a stair in three parts goes up to 20th.  Before the cart, I used to use that stair, sometimes in the rain, which meant I couldn't put any of my satchels down for its entire height.

This time, even without satchels, I wimped out of the third and easiest part, after climbing the second and hardest, shown above.  The bottom of the stair is next to a P-Patch, at which, Saturday afternoon, someone was watering; so I guess I should count P-Patches in parks (such as Magnuson Park) as examples of plumbing in those parks.

On this excursion I passed two groups of young people who weren't practising social distancing.  One was seventeen men in front of a fraternity house; the other was three men and a woman in front of a shack, behind which lay three tents.  It sure is great that our excellent mayor here in Seattle can be counted on to do the right thing in these cases.  After all, pandemics come and pandemics go, but it's always essential to punish the poor.

Ravenna Boulevard

This is a greenway running from Ravenna Park to Green Lake Park.  I'm familiar with it up to Roosevelt, in which stretch it includes an official park with signage but not listed on the website, Olga Park.  (EDIT 10/19 - Not an official park.)  It does not, however, that I've ever seen, include restrooms or water fountains.  When I go to Green Lake I'll take this route and cover it more fully; as a down payment here are the blocks I normally see on my way from campus to Ravenna Park via 20th, shot from their lower ends.

Park Home Circle

The first two intersections on Ravenna Boulevard are with Park Road, a small semicircle north of the boulevard; at the second the road continues south as 21st Ave.  Park Home Circle is a traffic circle somewhat frivolously placed within the semicircle.  You can see it from the boulevard:

Parents, if you take your kids to this one, have them approach it from the east,

so they can find this micro-park's claim to fame for themselves.

Ravenna Ravine

So I decided Sunday afternoon to finish the job by going to this one.  After all, how hard could it be?

Several weary miles later...  To reach Ravenna Ravine, or anyway what the parks department website calls by that name, you have to start from 25th Ave.  Turn onto 60th St into a micro-neighbourhood festooned with "dead end" signs.  Near the north end of this area's main street, 24th Ave, the address actually given by the website is a forbidding clump of bushes:

but just north of there, an actual trail invites the wayfarer.  Alas, it ends in a cliff a few feet in:

I guess it's clear from the photo that a path seems to lead left (south) there.  I followed this about ten feet south and two feet down before accepting that I'm no longer the intrepid explorer I used to be and clambering, with some difficulty, back to the street.  The path went further, visible every foot or two, almost as wide as my foot.  So I haven't really explored Ravenna Ravine, but I'm pretty confident it lacks restrooms and water fountains.

I'm not clear on to what extent this ravine connects with the ravine further south in Ravenna Park, on which more below.  Remember, the parks department doesn't do maps; Google Maps opines that they're two separate parks with private land between them.

Ravenna Park II

It was just after 8 P.M. when I got back to Ravenna Park's lower restrooms, which were locked.  So I went to the upper restrooms before calling it a night - and found them unlocked.  Not only that, but the men's room had acquired soap, and its clogged toilet had been fixed.  So why was this open when the main restrooms, the lower ones, were locked?

One hint:  Only the women's room was (and is) actually open; the men's room, whose door can be seen from a nearby parking lot, was unlocked but closed.  (The open door in the photo above was propped open by me, only long enough to take the picture.)

Another:  At 1 A.M. that night, I set out to University Playground, Cowen Park, and Ravenna Park, and found only Ravenna Park's upper restrooms unlocked.

A third:  Monday evening, just after 7 P.M., I found Cowen Park's restrooms locked, with the leafpile still at the men's room door; at 7:40 P.M. Ravenna Park's lower restrooms were locked; but at 7:50 the upper ones still weren't.

Finally, today (Tuesday, May 12, 2020), I found Ravenna Park's lower restrooms locked at 11:44 (A.M. PDT), the upper ones unlocked shortly before 12:07 P.M., Cowen Park's locked at 12:22, and University Playground's locked at 1:10.

The conclusion seems inescapable:  This work - not only of opening the rooms, but taking care of them - was done either by parks workers without authorisation, or by,private citizens.

Two months into the pandemic, twenty-four hour access to running water has reached the U-District, but only thanks to renegades or trespassers.

You will respond that this is a good deed for the numerous homeless people in the area who can now find toilets, sinks, and drinking water all in one place.  But that's precisely my point.  Our wonderful mayor would undoubtedly have gotten around to this good deed.  She might even have done so before the end of the pandemic.  And now the opportunity has been stolen from her by some nobodies.  It's lèse-majesté, that's what it is, and I trust she will invoke the full majesty of the law against the perpetrators.  Good deed?  Bah, humbug!

EDIT:  I'm delighted to report that tonight at about 10:30 P.M., when I tried to use the upper Ravenna Park restrooms, I found them locked.  Probably the nightly locker of restrooms got to the park, found the lower ones already locked, and looked around for something else to lock.  So it all worked out for the best.
   Nobody had yet read this page of you, dear Diary, by the time those restrooms were locked.

Ravenna Park III

On Monday, after checking that Cowen Park's restrooms were still locked, I knew it was too late for locked rooms at University Playground to mean anything, and hadn't the heart to go on anyway.  Meanwhile, on this trip I'd noticed what looked like a paved path in the ravine north of Cowen Park, so I wanted to check that out.  I'd been imagining Cowen Park, which is considerably lower than most of the streets that surround it, as a kind of spreading-out of the ravine; is it?

Well, not really but sort of.  Cowen Park is significantly higher ground than the ravine proper, but does provide access to it.  Unfortunately the paved path turned out to be gravel, and for most of its length old, mostly buried gravel.  There was a lot of this:

and enough of this:

that I can't say the ravine lacks running water, but it does lack plumbing.  Someone had tried to live there anyway:

I suspect, but don't know, that that's the result of a sweep.  Now, these days most sweeps are done on the basis that the camps swept are "obstructions".  You might notice that the only thing this camp obstructed was some trees, and wonder about that.  But this shows an inadequate perspective.  Many trees in forests are obstructed by undergrowth, or fallen trees.  Therefore, obstructing trees is a subhuman, vegetative thing to do.  It's for his own good that this camper was swept, to restore him to his rightful place as a human being.  Never let it be said that our wonderful mayor lacks compassion.

Anyway, there were lots of side paths, but the main path leads to the bowl in lower Ravenna Park, which actually is the sort of widening out of the ravine that I'd imagined Cowen Park to be.