Bad Apples in the Bonny Green Wood

Dear Diary,

This is a page I've put off writing for months now, partly because in it I have to show my fellow homeless behaving terribly.  But I've already had occasion to mention relevant facts, and it's time to get it all said.  There are, however, four parks between where I left off, in "South of North Once More, Part II" on October 8, and the scene of the crimes.

This page and the next two focus mostly on parks I haven't previously told you about, dear Diary.  They represent hikes I originally took June 25 and 26, and repeated October 9 and 10, because the photos I took the first time were lost when my phone was stolen in mid-July.  I was, oddly, able to retake most of the same photos, plus a few more, this time.

To begin with, a park not Parks', which I didn't see last time, having taken a different route.  The Phinney Neighborhood Association has a small park next to its office near Phinney Ave N and N 67th St.  The part that was empty, so I could photograph it, was, of course, the chess tables.

Sandel Playground

When I first saw this park between 1st and 2nd Avenues NW and NW 90th and 92nd Streets - the only Greenwood park in "NW" - I had just come from the quiet and not very friendly parks of Crown Hill, and I was astonished by what I found:  a park full of people.  I'd forgotten what community looked like.  On the nights of June 24 and October 8 I slept in it, grateful that it did empty out after dark, and the mornings, especially in October, were quieter.  But anyway, trying to explain what I'd seen, of course I didn't inquire about local housing or organisations.  Nope, all that community could only result from the park's own landscape.  The first time, I took a rather precious picture of a minor detail of that landscape which I liked, rather like this:

But the second time the park was empty enough I could take a more typical picture of its landscape:

In June, it was pretty obvious that a water fountain had been removed; a Parks employee confirmed that the removal had been in April.  I took a photo of the removal site and a nearby basketball court that actually looks like a basketball court.

As you can see, times change:  the water fountain came back, and was running.  The men's room, both times, had no doors and no dryer.

After getting food at the Fred Meyer that is what enables all other food sources in Greenwood to be posh and expensive, and that is also in "NW", a few mostly Healthy Streets-closed blocks from Sandel, which is why this page gives all direction markers in addresses -  Anyway, from Fred Meyer I went on each time to

Alice Ball Park

The first time, I spent much of June 25 writing the "History and Parks" pages that have introduced such an amazing number of people to the Ballard parks.  (Well, an amazingly low number, anyhow.)  I did this at the Greenwood branch of the library.

Alice Ball Park is a smallish park opened in 2019 across a notional N 81st St from the library on Greenwood Ave N.  It's where I ate several times June 25, and breakfast October 9.  But I wasn't grateful enough to find any "neat stuff", which is what I still then thought any non-utilitarian photos I showed you, dear Diary, had to be.

But then I read a book about women in STEM that had a chapter on Alice Ball.  Apparently she was a black nurse, trained in Seattle, who more or less single-handedly solved the problems that made the only drug for treating leprosy in her day ineffective.  So I started to feel guilty about how I'd treated her park.

Anyway, as we just saw, I've become more comfortable with showing you landscape photos, so here, dear Diary, is one:

The park is usually more crowded than that.

Greenwood Park

This park is officially at Fremont Ave N and N 89th St, but I usually enter it from the equivalent latitude of Evanston Ave N.  It answers a mystery that had been with me since my first visit to Little Brook Park in Lake City ("Top of the City, Part I").  That park has a single, hopelessly privacy-compromised restroom.  But surely even such bad restrooms are sold in packs of two; so where was the other?

Greenwood Park, that's where.  On my first visit the door could at least be latched, but on my second, a lock was so placed as to prevent that, just as at Little Brook.  Also, the restroom is in a somewhat more open part of the park, so someone trying to use the ventilation holes to peep would be more noticeable.  But it looks like parks planners of some past date or other just thought women had no business being in far northern Seattle parks.

The freestanding water fountain near the restroom wasn't working June 25 but ran fine October 9.  The restroom, besides having a very dubious door, has no dryer.

I like the park otherwise, so the only photos I took each time were of "neat stuff".  There are big signs presenting the park's history, one in terms of transportation to Greenwood, the other about the site's Japanese former owners:

(Each is accompanied by another sign giving a broader context.)

And there's another proper basketball court, with backboards behind the backboards which, punctured in constellation patterns, and also scrawled in graffiti, really appealed to me June 25, so I took the photos again, but am not now sure why:

The park is nearly done with a small expansion.

Licton Springs Park

is just east of northeast of Greenwood Park, a couple of blocks west of North Seattle College.  It is mostly wetlands:

In the eastern non-wetland area I saw a few picnic tables in June; I didn't circle the park in October.  The western part includes the restrooms and a playground whose pavement and related decorations captivated me at first glance:

However, "Hopscotch Lane", which presents itself as the whole thing though it isn't present in the area shown above, turned out simple when in October I could concentrate on it.

The reason I couldn't concentrate on Hopscotch Lane in June is that in Licton Springs Park, alone of the parks of North Seattle, I found homeless campers hogging the plumbing.

They had one of a dozen or so working water fountains in North Seattle this spring, and this is what they did with it.  And while that was enough to convince me to hike to Target north of Northgate for water that night, they'd taken other measures to deter anyone else from using public property:

The first time I visited, I arrived right around 7 P.M., so I could only hope the locked restroom doors represented parks staff treating these folks as they deserved.  As I left, I noticed the campers speaking of me with fear, as if I were an official, and beginning small, ineffectual clean-up efforts.  In the morning I was amazed to find that some innocent parks staffer actually had waded through all the junk and unlocked the restroom doors.  I left thinking that their future probably included either a social worker signing them up for trash removal, or a phalanx of twenty armed police sweeping them, and while I didn't quite wish a sweep on these losers, I sure wouldn't have objected to one.

As it turns out, their future included neither of those things.  All it took was for the Parks people finally to get fed up with cleaning the restrooms of people with no conception of cleanliness.  In September they got permission to close this seasonal restroom early for the winter:

And away the campers went.

Leaving behind only one, apparently unoccupied, tent:

and not much of their other trash:

except around the water fountains and men's room, where it still was, as shown above, October 9, perhaps as an object lesson.

Not that the campers needed any more sins to their names, but remember that map way up there?  These folks were camping mostly north and northeast of the restrooms - in wetlands.

I think I've seen traces of the diaspora of slobs.  Already in Woodland Park signs of strain, in the cooperation of campers and parks staff over trash, had included a small number of tents obviously not with the program, junk scattered around them.

It was a great relief, both times, to go on to

Mineral Springs Park

This is a four-acre triangle of land between N 105th St, N Northgate Way, and a row of houses more or less where they'd be if Wallingford Ave N had continued north.  Under the name "North Seattle Park", it languished more or less ignored until a crew of disc golfers decided it perfectly met their needs, bringing all their paraphernalia, in the 1990s.  This got the attention of community groups, and by about 2000, two competing visions existed, eventually to become two competing maps:

In a pleasant surprise, the second map, the disc golfers', is much nearer reality today:  Virtue Actually Victorious.  A work of art, Cloud Stones by Stacy Levy, does grace land on both sides of the north-south route between park entrances:

Within the course, the logic of the game has worked with a bit of romanticism to create something neat at the park's remaining corner:

On one side of a thin wall, the traffic of Northgate Way races by; on the other, if you've the guts for it, you can be snug in your nook.  It's perhaps the strangest place in the parks of Greenwood.