Today's page is about four parks - or five if you count as the parks department does - that are all pretty close to each other, and that, taken together, project an image of an almost normal spring in the parks. Two have no plumbing; in the other two, only one shut-off water fountain attests the current abnormal situation.
They're also all kind of hard to enter, so I'm giving more detailed directions. They're all between 1st and 15th Avenues and 125th and 145th Streets.
Jackson Park
The parks department's website lists 413 parks. It does not, however, list among those Jackson Park. This is partly because it leases much of the park to a private company, Premier Golf. (So this is the flip side of Nathan Hale Playfield and Cedar Park.) Sad to say, this private company does a significantly better job of running things than I've found elsewhere in northeast Seattle. Only two other parks there have all their plumbing working - Burke-Gilman Playground Park and Little Brook Park - and those two have only one or two restrooms and one water fountain each.
Visited May 14, 15, 26 and 27; over four restrooms, at least two pairs open, and at least two water fountains, both running
Jackson Park is, according to the parks department website and signage, two entirely separate not-quite-park entities: Jackson Park Golf Course and Jackson Park Perimeter Trail. Both are easiest to enter from 15th Ave, but the actual entrance to the golf course and the most informative entrance to the trail are further west, officially at 10th, actually best reached from 11th Ave and 130th St. A sign for the trail near that intersection has a map of the trail on its trail-facing back. As for the golf course, from 11th and 130th look around and identify the most active parking lot. At that lot's head, you go up a steep incline to reach the main golf course buildings open to the public.
I don't buy the idea that these are two separate non-parks. For one thing, both have the same official hours, "Dawn to Dusk", which is decidedly non-standard for Seattle parks. However, all the plumbing is in the golf course. I found much too little information online about the trail, so when I get the chance, I'll describe it in more detail. Meanwhile, the golf course.
I didn't visit the course proper, only the cluster of buildings at the top of that hill. There are essentially three - a cafe, which wasn't open anytime I was there; a shop staffed by professional golfers, so called the "pro shop", the course's nerve centre; and a building supporting a driving range, which is free and open to the public. Each of these has restrooms. One pro assured me that all these restrooms are open to the public; another, that no Premier Golf employee would block a well behaved member of the public from them. I'm unsure anyway about the cafe - aren't restaurants in general still keeping their restrooms closed? But the driving range has two single-user rooms; the shop's men's room features several toilets, with the usual privacy features so often lacking for park toilets.
I tried the driving range's men's room; it had hot water, believe it or not, but was out of soap that morning, May 27. (So was BGPP's men's room, for days now. I take this as a good thing, actually - it implies that parks employees are prioritising getting the rooms open, not getting them perfect - though of course in a better world I wouldn't need to carry hand soap.)
The water fountains I found are side by side between the restrooms at the driving range. Of course there could be others. Some talk about how Jackson Park adapted to the coronavirus mentions "restrooms" removed from the course itself, but I'm told these were only, as this implies, "sanican"s.
Licorice Fern Natural Area
Visited May 15; no plumbing
We've already seen with Mock Creek Ravine that individual parts of the Thornton Creek Natural Area can have their own names. It now turns out you can have nested Natural Areas, as here. Licorice Fern has, according to Google, not the parks department, an address, and if you go to that address, the dead end of 130th St west of 12th Ave, you find a greensward with two trails leading away. I followed one, though not far, somewhat shocked by the idea of a trail anywhere near Thornton Creek. (But wait until tomorrow...) I found a map online (PDF) later according to which these two trails are the only ones, and excused myself on that basis from exploring further.
Flicker Haven Natural Area
Visited May 15 and 27; no plumbing
This is the current official name of an area south of Jackson Park, or sometimes considered itself the southwest of Jackson Park. It has also been known as "Thornton Creek Park #1". I haven't been able to reconcile descriptions of that with what I've found except by assuming the descriptions actually refer to the P-Patch which is in the northern end of what Google Maps thinks of as this park. That P-Patch is on 10th Ave just north of a notional 130th St, on 10th represented by an overpass.
The 8th Ave border isn't much more informative. I couldn't tell whether the dead end of 130th St east of 8th included any public property. Where 8th Ave turns and becomes 8th Ct, a trail appears, continuing north in the line of 8th Ave until it descends, probably to merge with the Jackson Park Perimeter Trail.
This page has a sort of map, but at least on my phone it doesn't render well. Evidently people have worked within this area, but I don't know how they entered.
On this trip, I already knew I'd be covering Green Lake and other parks with strictly "N" addresses. There are only two parks west of I-5 with "NE" addresses; since this next one has restrooms, I decided to cover them in this trip and set of pages.
Northacres Park and Playfield
Visited May 15 and 27; two pairs of restrooms (one all-gender single-user), for openness see below, and three water fountains, two running
This park is both terribly and excellently named. It's entirely south of Jackson, Little Brook and Cedar Parks, and it's smaller not only than Jackson and Magnuson Parks but also than Ravenna Park and Matthews Beach. But it still feels like acres, especially along its thickly forested north side, which stretches from I-5 to 1st Ave along 130th St, and it's still pretty far north for most of us. As for its surname: in Seattle's park nomenclature, "park" outranks "playfield"; Magnuson Park has a dozen ball fields, but nobody tacks an "and Playfields" onto its name. This, too, however, makes sense, as I'll explain.
Northacres Park has the less common of the Seattle parks' two usual schedules. It used to have the more common, and in this photo I can only hope you can see the different schedules on the two signs:
The two schedules are 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. (the default) and 6 A.M. to 10 P.M. I suspect but do not know that the latter is usually thanks to neighbours. Other parks I've covered that open at 6 are:
Laurelhurst Playfield
Ravenna Park
University Playground
Matthews Beach
Albert Davis Park
The park's official address is on 1st Ave, near a notional 127th St. There one finds a seemingly ordinary park, with two age-specific playgrounds, a basketball hoop crowded by art, and weird plumbing: two single-user all-gender restrooms, with two winter-hardened water fountains attached. The weirdest thing about this not so ordinary park, however, is that in several directions it's surrounded by woods.
I don't remember any issues with the restrooms, which I used on May 15, except that I found them locked. I'd had little luck calling the parks department weeks earlier, but decided to try again, and not only reached someone, but he got multiple parks employees to come unlock them. On May 27 I filled two 20-ounce bottles from the water fountains and found it good water.
The guy who actually unlocked the rooms on May 15 represented himself as the boss of the person who'd forgotten to. He's the one who told me Little Brook's restroom had reopened - he'd done that the same morning. He wouldn't give me his name, but said he was close to retirement; I'll probably quote him enough to get him in trouble if any of his bosses ever read any of this, but doubt the trouble would be serious.
For now, however, I only need to thank him for pointing me to the playfield, which is in a different clearing in the woods, several blocks away. This is why "and Playfield" makes sense to me here. You reach Northacres Playfield by continuing south on 1st Ave, turning left onto 125th St, and turning left again on 3rd Ave. This is a couple of baseball diamonds, a couple of picnic tables, restrooms and a water fountain; on May 27, without a game going, I found it kind of sad.
That day I used the men's room (which was open on both May 15 and May 27). It was poor for privacy, but not as bad as Waldo Dahl Playfield or Little Brook Park. Its sink, however, is of the same design as the one I remember from Cal Anderson Park: spraying so much water horizontally that it's much better for soaking whatever's in your pockets than for washing your hands.
The water fountain, near but not visibly attached to the restrooms, is not running. And that returns us to the real world of northeast Seattle's parks in May 2020, the last ten of which I'll discuss in less detail tomorrow.
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