History and Parks, part I

Dear Diary,

Monday June 22 I went from Fremont, which treasures quirk, to Ballard, which treasures history.  Ballard used to be a separate city (for 18 years) until it agreed to annexation by Seattle, and it never lets the visitor to its parks forget it.  (To be fair, though, most of this insistence is in parks I don't get to until the next page.)

Anyway, I've been very liberal with photos this trip, and I was worried some would disappear, as they sometimes do when my camera gets crowded, so I tried to post that night.  Unfortunately, the Ballard public library turned out to treat internet access the way many public buildings treat electricity - free inside, but forbidden out.  So here I am at the Greenwood branch days later with a huge backlog, and I'll just have to see how far I can get.  I probably won't fully catch up for days to come.

After the Fremont Canal Park below, everything address-wise is "NW" for pages and days to come.  Other things I encountered less constantly, but still many times every day:  crows that disapproved of my existence, and would chase me for a block or two to tell me about it; and winds that disapproved of my taking notes on paper, and scattered those notes so many times that last night (June 24) my inseam split on my 854th retrieval dive.  Finally, until I say otherwise, you have to assume that I saw my peers, at and between many of the "NW" parks; it would be invidious to call out all the campers, so I only mention my fellow homeless when I have a point to make.

I EDITED this page Sunday June 28 on looking at my receipts and finding I'd misreported my grocery shopping.

I EDITED it again Monday June 29 on revisiting Sunset Place and probably Cascade Place.

First a leftover from Sunday night.

The Burke-Gilman Trail

It didn't occur to me until I experienced it that because the trail goes under bridges, it offers the chance to watch them split from below.  Not actually as impressive a sight as watching that mountain of bridge rise in front of you when you're on it, but maybe interesting still.

A. B. Ernst Park

This hasn't closed for its expansion construction yet, but the writing is literally on the wall:

The fence shown there doesn't block the trail yet, but it will - construction is planned for August.  The sign includes a map:

This makes it clear that the existing park's dubious main attraction, some Brutalist concrete benches, will not survive in its present form.  Now, I've never seen that thing as "neat stuff", but I have no objection to documenting something soon to go, so:

Apparently when they're done the trail will go all the way down, no stairs needed, so I'm altogether happy.

The non-Jurassic parts of Fremont Canal Park

Apparently they squeeze the Fremont Fair into here every year, so talking about this park is probably coals to Newcastle, but anyway there's something sort of neat.  There are four odd pieces of furniture along the park's length, at least one in the "NW" part.  Three of them, including the "NW" one, are surrounded by bushes, as if to disguise them as incipient topiary.

And one is a chess bench.  I have something of a soft spot for chess benches; one of my last student newspaper stories was about them.  More precisely, about what proved a successful attempt to destroy a chess community by splitting its benches up, so it's kind of perverse of me to highlight this solitary one, but anyway, a chess bench disguised as topiary:

Fremont Canal Park gives every sign of abandoning parkness for trailness well before its notional end at 3rd Ave NW, but if you stick it out that far, you can go straight up 3rd to:

Ross Park

This park is three blocks west of Fremont Peak Park, and probably about three blocks down from it.  It's the only park in this page that isn't open 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M.; Ross keeps the less common 6 A.M. to 10 P.M. schedule.  There's some dispute about the name.  The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation website calls it "Ross Playground".  The park's scoreboard calls it "Ross Playfield":

But I'm going with the park's main sign:

Anyway, this was my first stop with a restroom.  The water fountain wasn't working, of course, but the restroom worked fine.  (I won't be saying that about most "NW" park restrooms.)

One bit of neat stuff is in the playground, which sort of successfully carries through the spider theme suggested:

But there's something neater between the restrooms, a mosaic whose makers' names I haven't found:

From there I continued on 3rd to...

A small neighbourhood with four very small parks

The neighbourhood is one I'd glimpsed, because it's just west of Woodland Park Zoo.  The first park I reached is

Sunset Place

This is a triangle, a rather tall one with some benches at the top to take in whatever view can be had at 1st Ave and 52nd St.  My first reaction on seeing it was "What a good use of space!", and I stand by that.  But I didn't climb up to the benches, which was apparently foolish of me, because the parks department website seems to say there's a water fountain there.  Sorry!

EDIT June 29:  OK, now I have.  And there is indeed a water fountain up there, a bizarrely familiar elementary school model, but it RUNS!  This means all three working water fountains in "NW" are south of 60th St.  Sorry, I didn't taste the water.  But here's a picture of the fountain and the park:

The Mystery of Cascade Place

This time I'll actually quote the parks department website, which in a single sentence:

This turnaround island at the end of Palmer Court NW is in Ballard just west of NW Market St at NW 52nd St.

manages to get at most two things right.  This park was the subject of the first question I addressed to Rachel Schulkin, Communications Manager for the department.  (I'd tried to reach her before but never gotten an answer; this turned out to be because I hadn't asked specific questions.)  Anyway, she answered but didn't sound certain; going by her answer, it does exist, it is at an end of Palmer Court, and it is technically in Ballard.  It is not, however, a turnaround island, near 52nd St, or just west of Market St.  I took a bunch of pictures.  First, the situation.  Palmer Court is a short gravel street that heads southeast from 2nd Ave some feet south of 52nd St.  The address given by the department, not that those are always reliable, puts Cascade Place at the interior end, where there's no turnaround island, but is a bunch of greenery.  This is where Google Maps and Ms. Schulkin say it is.  Presumably it's a different part of this greenery from this one:

I also took pictures of both ends of Palmer Court:

and of 52nd St just west of Market St (specifically, Baker Ave and 52nd)

just to show the absence of traffic islands.

EDIT 6/29:  On the premise that the park, if it exists, must be at the interior end of Palmer Court, I took a video of that end today.  I think the likeliest candidate for parkhood is whatever is at the top of the low steps seen in the video, but given the "PRIVATE PROPERTY" sign and a loudly barking large dog nearby, I thought there was too much chance someone with a shotgun was what's at the top of those steps.  Anyway, the video:

Rainier Place

This triangle is where 53rd St intersects with 54th St, I am not making this up.  The department website gets only one thing wrong, calling it "grassy".  It is dominated by a conifer tree whose generic name I should but don't know, and the needles discourage grass from most of the space.

Greenwood Triangle

This triangle is at 3rd Ave and 55th St, strictly speaking across the street from the weirdly laid out small neighbourhood, and actually is grassy.

Next west on Market up to 9th Ave.

Gilman Playground

This extends from 54th past 53rd, but private houses fill half the second block; it runs one long block from 9th to 11th Avenues.  At 4 acres it's bigger than Ross (2.35) let alone the others.  So it has a restroom and water fountain, but here's what's strange:  both work!  I was so gobsmacked I took pictures to establish a chain of evidence.  Working water fountain:

That water fountain is near this restroom:

And that restroom is in Gilman Playground:

You see, I'd gone on a quest for the hypothetical western boundary of the dry park water fountain problem, and I'd found it!  Admittedly, at the westernmost park water fountain in that part of town, but you can't have everything.  (Remember, I hadn't yet found the water fountain at Sunset Place.)

The men's room has a lockable door, but no dryer.

By far the neatest thing I saw Monday at Gilman Playground was an absence.  There were a lot of tents in the park, and some visibly homeless people (including me) outside them.  There were also a lot of visibly housed people there.  And they were all minding their own business.  It was such a refreshing change from the usual park interactions within either group or between the groups.  I concluded that when Ballard Commons was swept not long ago, all the best-behaved of my peers had come to Gilman Playground, but I sure don't know why the housed were behaving so well.

I eventually decided to photograph some drums in the playground.  Plastic, they aren't loud, just audible enough to get across the acoustics lesson of differently sized instruments:

From Gilman Playground I went to the nearby Safeway and got the day's groceries, about which I'll talk more when posting about the 23rd.  But then I headed south for one more park, dear Diary, after which I have to stop writing you for a while, but I'll try to return today.  This is the 14th Ave NW Boat Ramp, and isn't close to any other parks.  Unlike the Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp, it had no "sanican" that day.  I took a picture of its seascape:

Then, having done Number One at both Ross and Gilman, I discovered an urgent need to do Number Two.  So I went to Fred Meyer, and paid for the use of their restroom (which also lacked drying capacity at the time) by buying a map of the Eastside there.

Next page, today, I hope, covers downtown Ballard.