It's embarrassing to be so far behind with you that I'm still narrating to you hikes from mid-October, practically summer. But if it's any consolation, this page and another I plan to write in you today feature photographs taken today. There was a park mystery, and last night I had to visit the 24-hour restroom at View Ridge Playfield, spent the night in that park's shelter shiveringly trying to sleep, and finally this morning set out to resolve that mystery, plus some smaller mysteries, and take some pictures. So this page, and the one I intend to write Wednesday, won't all be summer hikes.
On October 12, then, I took 15th Ave from Sacajawea Playground, where I left off in the last page, to Northgate Way. I'd noticed Patty's Eggnest at its Holman Road location, and that morning I felt rich enough to get breakfast at the Northgate one, an omelet I ate in a bus shelter. Then I went and splurged some more, at Target, whose elevators had been fixed, getting umbrellas, and a cap to replace one that had fallen off my cart once there were masks under it, boosting it too high.
Which brings me to something important. I had, both on June 27 while visiting the 'last seven' parks, and on October 12, nine masks. Three were gifts, and six I bought myself, at Target. These six are very well designed, because they not only cover my mouth and nose, but for even better protection, my eyes as well. Unfortunately, my glasses objected to this, and the rainy day June 27, when I first visited the 'last seven' parks, the mask, which I was then wearing for the first time, fought back, in particular by serving as a slide down which the glasses could fall off my nose.
I admit, for the hike that was finally, on October 12, nearing its end, I wimped out and chose one of the three masks I'd been given, instead.
Anyway, fortified by food, I set off again. This hike had a number of objectives: First, to check on water fountains in North Seattle. Second, to replace the photographs of some parks that I'd lost when my phone was stolen in July. By October 12, that meant mostly what I'd thought, on June 27, were the last seven North Seattle parks I hadn't visited. Third, to visit parks I'd learnt of since. And fourth, to settle various questions about parks along the way, and photograph some of those I hadn't photographed before.
Northgate Park
Introduced May 29 in "South to and from Northgate".
Free-standing water fountain more or less mid-park: NOT RUNNING.
Northgate Park turns out to be oddly bifurcated, its north side full of concrete and, well, weird stuff:
the south, well, not:
I stayed by the Northgate branch of the Seattle Public Library there for a while, catching up on Wi-Fi stuff, but not writing in you, dear Diary.
Maple Leaf Community Garden
This was one of the 'last seven'; in fact, three of those are introduced in this page, and since I covered three in "Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us!", that leaves only one for the pages ahead. This one is near 5th Ave on 103rd St, actually across that street from Beaver Pond Natural Area, which, however, I didn't visit this time.
In June when I first visited, I found men working to build it, but by October it was a fully functioning ...
P-patch?
Actually the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation lists in its part of the Seattle real property report (which is where the list of the 'last seven' came from) several P-patches, including two of the 'last seven'. It isn't usual, and it's worth asking why each time, but it isn't extraordinary.
In this case, my guess is that the Department of Neighborhoods, the usual custodian of P-patches, maybe doesn't have as much experience taking care of gorgeous old buildings, like the tower that dominates this 'park', as the parks department has.
But that's only a guess.
Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area
This next 'last seven' park is where Victory Creek, as in Victory Creek Park a few blocks north, meets the south branch of Thornton Creek. Or maybe it's just somewhere near the actual confluence. It's hard to tell, because its size as reported, a quarter acre, is nowhere near the size of the woods around the confluence, and of course there's no signage:
(12/15 edit) There's a video embedded there, but near as I can tell, Blogspot is not currently allowing me to write pages that show readers of you, dear Diary, embedded videos. (This may be a general thing, or may be specific to me; dunno.) The other recent page for which this is an issue is "A Problem", which is all about problems with videos and includes a pointer to its video at YouTube. Here's a pointer to this video at YouTube. What the video shows is lots of woods, with no sign singling out one quarter-acre as a public park.
So in this page's title, "Six Parks in Search of Another" (with apologies to Pirandello, who wrote a play whose English title I like, but I still haven't read or seen the play), Victory Creek Confluence Natural Areais the "Another".
In case you want to look for yourself, the official address is 1039 NE 108th St, although my Rand McNally map claims the actual confluence is between 11th and 12th Avenues. The relevant instance of 108th St can be reached from Roosevelt Way.
Victory Creek Park
Introduced in the same page as Northgate Park. I didn't go back to this frustrating park on this hike, so no, it isn't one of the title's "six parks". Rather, I found out while writing this page that the frustrating thing about it - the absence of the picnic tables and playground its sign claims it has - was planned (PDF) as far back as 2018, and presumably happened by the time of my first visit in May.
Victory Heights Playground
Introduced in the same page as Northgate and Victory Creek Parks.
Two water fountains attached to the Victory Heights Co-op Preschool - NOT RUNNING
Note that this makes eleven, not ten, water fountain sites in North Seattle attached to heated buildings, and five, not four, of those not running this year. (See the digression in the recent page "To a Land of Water and Honey".)
This time I took a picture of the translucent playground equipment I thought was neat in May. Unfortunately the weather wasn't cooperative in allowing me also to photograph the coloured shadows they cast.
I actually didn't take any notes about the water fountains on October 12. So when I was done with Meadowbrook, as narrated below, I came back to Victory Heights. Well, no, that isn't quite true. On my October visit, I'd found an entire fantasy trilogy I'd enjoyed, in hardcover at a nearby Little Free Library, but was in no position to carry them away. I talked myself into coming back to see if they were still there, today, and since I didn't find the book bin before reaching the park ... The books weren't there when I did find it. I have two reasons for thinking the water fountains weren't running in October: 1) I remember my relief at finally finding a working fountain at Meadowbrook later that day, and 2) the fountains didn't have much tree litter in them today, but they had too much to have been shut off a week or two ago.
Lavilla Meadows Natural Area
This is the third and last of this page's 'last seven' parks. It's well hidden, but actually findable.
First, find Fischer Place, a diagonal connecting the Victory Heights neighbourhood with the Meadowbrook one. Exit Victory Heights; on foot, one can do this at 102nd St. Cross Lake City Way somewhere that seems safe. Fischer Place starts opposite 102nd, and goes up to 105th west of 27th Ave.
On Fischer, look for Lavilla Dairy. Go in back to the parking lot. Behind the parking lot you should find this:
and this:
It's over four acres, so it's probably all the woods behind Fischer Place.
Meadowbrook Playfield
Introduced May 6 in "Go North, Aging Man!".
Free-standing water fountain near the picnic shelter shown two pages ago - ON, and overflowing enough that I couldn't use it. (Today, however, it was of course NOT RUNNING.)
Water fountain attached to the restroom building west of there - NOT RUNNING October 12; I don't think I bothered today
Free-standing water fountain near the tennis courts, furthest west - ON, and my first chance that day to fill my water bottles; I didn't pass near it today.
The relief a working water fountain gave me that day left me feeling kinda guilty when I left the park without having found a single thing I wanted to photograph. So when I got there today, I was determined to fix it.
See, the problem is general. Playfields, in Seattle's hierarchy of parks, are mainly for big grassy areas for sports (specifically baseball), and even though I played in Little League, I don't find these photogenic. So I always have to more or less do an end run around the park's whole reason for being, find some angle, and Meadowbrook had always seemed angle-free to me.
But the October visit was the first on which (because of Fischer Place) I'd approached along 105th, and noticed a lot of rather un-playfield-like land, greenswards and woods and just disorganised compared to the square playfield norm.
So first of all, yes, there's a brook at Meadowbrook.
It creates something of a view from a well-placed picnic bench:
But a square enough reader might prefer the picture I took first, cynically, figuring playgrounds are always safe, even though I find this one as bland as the rest of the playfield:
(Seattle Public Utilities) Meadowbrook Pond Nature Refuge
This was the mystery I set out to solve this morning. At Matthews Beach there's a map of the Thornton Creek watershed, and it shows a park right across the street from Meadowbrook Playfield. I needed another park to make up the six, not wanting to use Hubbard Homestead, which I still haven't photographed and in which I'd most recently done Number One. So I thought I'd go solve it.
Well, there isn't much mystery. This park not Parks' of course doesn't have usual parks department signage; it also doesn't actually have much frontage on 35th Ave. So for someone as unobservant as me to miss it made sense, but it was there all along.
It doesn't have any restrooms or water fountains, but I fell in love with it and took scads of pictures anyway, too many for this page. In fact, although I'd planned to put one here as a teaser, Blogspot won't let me. So that's why, dear Diary, I plan to write two pages in you today.
I hope you had a good holiday. I did, in a way - I listened to music I'm fond of, and was able to do so sitting down, because the day before, I got renewed access to University Wi-Fi. So you might ask, why is this the first you're hearing when I've had connection at my fingertips for two days? Well, I spent the first charging stuff, and the second was the holiday. But now, with all the shelters out of the way, I can carry on with the story of my early-October long hike for you, dear Diary, specifically continuing on October 11 from where I left it in "Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us".
You may remember way back to "To a Land of Water and Honey" that I went from Lake City to Northgate via Pinehurst Playground, which is covered in the latter page. It took me a while to get over my conviction that leaving Pinehurst should be easy and actually consult a map, which of course showed it would be easy if I just knew which turns to make. At any rate, although the hike to Northgate wasn't prolonged that much by this, the sun was setting by the time it ended.
I had meant to take the astonishing wealth I'd gotten, and told you about in "To a Land of Water and Honey", and splurge at Target. I was also looking forward to Target because I badly needed to do Number One. So of course the elevators weren't working, and a disturbing individual was standing near them, so I didn't even consider leaving my cart to take the stairs. Also, after I'd instead done Number One into some bushes in Hubbard Homestead, I found that I'd done a terrible job of scouting for places to sleep.
Now, I had to climb Maple Leaf Hill again, to photograph the shelter the last page discussed, to check on the same park's water fountain, and to visit a new park (not one of the "last seven" I'd visited in June). I just hadn't figured out how to fit it into the hike. So why not make lemonade out of this situation, and climb the hill just then? I bought a flashlight first, just in case.
Maple Leaf Reservoir Park
Introduced May 29 in "South to and from Northgate".
The climb up Roosevelt was uneventful, and I checked places along the way to sleep if the shelter didn't pan out. Of course I didn't actually need the flashlight. The shelter was easy to find, but was, as you know, dear Diary, from the previous page, totally unsuitable for sleeping. Nevertheless it was useful, for two reasons I forgot to mention.
First, it had rained that day, from about the time I left Little Brook Park for at least half an hour. Not a very big deal, but I had to dry my stuff.
Second, given its location on the southwest slope of a tall hill, this park gets amazing winds. So its shelter, while therefore even worse for sleeping in, was a great place to dry that stuff, as long as I could keep it all from blowing away.
So I set up the drying, and then opened the foil packet the generous woman near Jackson Park had given me. It was indeed steak, and I happily started to eat.
While I did so, a young man, probably not over 30, approached. He looked and sounded East African. He told me, again and again, "You have to leave." He said I could finish eating first. Then when I had finished and had started packing up my stuff, he asked me if I had any money. "I sure do!", I replied. He asked for some. I figured the last thing I should do that day was be greedy, so I reached into my pocket.
It turned out the $500 I'd been given had sunk to the bottom of that pocket, churning everything else as it went. It took me forever to find a bill, and of course when I did it was a $20. Well, I didn't want to be greedy, so I handed it to him. He asked if I had any more; I evaded by pointing out how long it had taken me to find that one. He then claimed that $20 bills were weird, and he wanted something more conventional like a $1 or a $5. I refused to dig into my pocket again, he, I am not making this up, handed me back the $20, and I left.
I didn't sleep much that night, but what little sleep I did get was in a dry patch in a doorway a few blocks away. (It didn't help that the local 7-Eleven wasn't open when I went.) An old and fancy building seemed about to come down across the street, but in the morning it turned out to be well along to demolition, and swarming with workers, so I took no photos.
When I returned to the park in the morning, it was to find the baby shelter, to photograph both, to check the water fountain attached to the restroom building (not running, as mentioned a few posts back), and, once again, to do Number One. But of course my harasser returned and told me yet again, "You have to leave." By 7:35 I gave up on waiting for the restroom to open, and obeyed him.
My main impression of the upper part of this park is that it's acres and acres of wind. I took a couple of photos no doubt failing to evoke that.
I also took a photo to show that even though I hadn't actually entered it, the men's room really does have a dryer and a door.
So the question left is, who's the harasser? He was neither dressed nor equipped as any remotely competent homeless man would have been even then. He could be a local madman who's appointed himself protector of the park from all riffraff other than, um, himself. He could be a local resident with the same self-appointed mission, and returned the money either to make me think him crazy, to avoid a conflict of interest, or both. Or he could be in the employ of a local organisation who evidently haven't thought much about what homeless people want out of parks. Beats me.
Waldo Woods
Anyway, I left the park and headed north on 15th Ave to 85th St and the address of the new park...
say what?
After some research on my phone (boy, am I grateful for that battery!), I discovered that what the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation actually obtained was a conservation easement, not an actual park. Waldo Woods consists of several dozen Douglas firs. Most are within the bounds of the new occupant, but can be seen just fine up there in the sky:
and they left a bay in the wall allowing access to a few complete trees.
Sacajawea Playground
Introduced May 29 in the same page as Maple Leaf Reservoir Park.
While on Maple Leaf Hill it seemed crazy not to check out the hill's remaining park and at least take one picture, so I continued along 15th Ave and did so:
In the process I noticed for the first time that the park is not just a greensward centred on a single tree. Instead it has woods on each side, visible in this photo. These woods turned out to be walkable, and so at last I was able to do Number One.
Sorry, dear Diary, for a page so focused on my bodily functions. Tomorrow, seven of the many parks near Northgate.
Whew! Just one more page, and I can go back to telling you about October 11 and 12, and then October 16 and 17.
This page is actually sort of about those dates too, as well as about October 9 and 10. Because I saw a picnic shelter discussed in this page on each of those pairs of dates: I slept in Carkeek Park's shelter 2 between the 9th and 10th, and in one of Golden Gardens Park's between the 16th and 17th, and visited Maple Leaf Reservoir Park's rentable shelter both the 11th and 12th. (It isn't at all a good place to sleep, plus I was harassed both dates.) It's worth remembering that each of those nights was rainy; I had to plan those hikes around shelters.
Carkeek Park
Carkeek Park has two shelters, but unlike Magnuson or Woodland Parks, or to anticipate a bit Golden Gardens or Maple Leaf Reservoir Parks, the two at Carkeek Park have very little in common.
I had rushed to Carkeek Park from way across town at Mineral Springs Park. Of course I wanted to check on Carkeek's water fountains, and I had to take pictures at the Blue Ridge parks on Carkeek's other side. But I also expected rain, and wanted a shelter roof over my head very much. When I saw what I'd be getting, I couldn't believe my luck.
The luck held, too. Soon after my arrival, a loud crowd of kids - high school or college, I thought - started trickling in. Apparently they'd planned to have a party in that building, but when they found me there, they gamely went on to shelter 1:
and didn't even reconsider their generosity when a torrential rain hammered their party and got them to flee.
Particularly relevant to this set of pages' focus, shelter 1 shelters no tables at all, shelter 2 (which is indeed the WPA project it looks like) three. This is, of course, reflected in their daily rates at Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation: $120 for #1, higher for #2 - but frankly, the latter is a preposterous steal at just $195. Just compare their rain resistance - shelter 1:
versus shelter 2:
The problem, of course, is location. Carkeek Park's shelters are on the park's main, upper, level, not on its beach; those at Golden Gardens, and the beach one at Magnuson, Parks are all level with their beaches. Separately, location is also the problem for homeless habitation. It's years of hard travel - well, anyway an hour or two, largely on gravel - to the QFC on Holman Road. You could only live in shelter 2 if you had a partner you could trust to protect your stuff, every time you went for supplies. At least there's a working water fountain, but for how long? (Neither shelter's sink was on; I'll spare you the photos I took of them.) Oh, and, of course, the ultimate 21st century deal-breaker: no electricity. So no, I won't be abandoning my doorway for Carkeek Park's palace in the sky.
I suppose what stories I have of Maple Leaf Reservoir, or of Golden Gardens, Parks belong not here but in the stories of the hikes themselves. (I will end the suspense right now on one count though: the young woman quoted in part I has not become the partner I'd need to live at Carkeek Park.)
Maple Leaf Reservoir Park
The rentable shelter is on the upper level of this two-tiered park. It is overwhelmingly made of metal. Seems to me all the parks in this page are even more unlikely to be in the path of a homeless wanderer seeking a seat than Woodland Park's shelter 7. But at Maple Leaf, that wanderer would only find metal seats anyhow. It's $210 per day.
This shelter does have electricity, though.
There's another shelter on the lower level, also all-metal. It's still too small to rent out; maybe in a decade or so it'll have grown big enough.
Meadowbrook Playfield
I only noticed this shelter out of sentimentality. When I was testing the nearby water fountain on October 12, I noticed some kids sitting there. At first I just envied them the shade they had, but then it penetrated my thick skull that they were playing D&D, or something similar, just like my friends and I at their age. Anyway, they left before I did, so I took a picture of another non-rentable shelter.
With, sigh, metal seats.
Golden Gardens Park
As mentioned above, these shelters are practically on the beach. So of course they partake of the beach ethos, that rain does not exist, and neither is really designed as shelter at all, so much as shade. (They're basically identical, including in price, each $120 per day.)
I survived because each does have a table, shoved against its other amenities at the dryest place in the "shelter". I bumped my cart up against the table and sat myself and my satchels on it too.
Well, as shelters at Magnuson and Maple Leaf Reservoir Parks and Meadowbrook Playfield have shown, not all park picnic shelters are listed in the rental list. There are also other kinds of shelter with seating in some parks. In particular, if seeking such, be sure to try the baseball fields' bullpens. But I trust this is enough to show that the parks can't single-handedly provide the sheltered seating homeless people will want this winter. I hope this winter won't be standing room only for me, but it will be for too many of us.
Well, that turned out to be more than a few hours, didn't it? Sigh. Anyway. This page is about the seven rentable picnic shelters of Woodland Park, which are in the western half of the eastern block of that park, the block called by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation Lower Woodland Park.
These shelters are in woodlands, rolling in the north, flatter in the south, and those hills, plains and valleys were, when I visited in early October, crowded with tents. You may remember, dear Diary, that in the two pages titled "South of North Once More", a geological age or so ago, I expressed surprise that pretty well all the homeless people I'd seen in Green Lake Park, both tent campers and shocked-looking men I interpreted as newly homeless, in early June, were gone in early October. What I didn't say then was that the homeless population in Woodland Park, specifically the west and especially the northwest of Lower Woodland, had grown exponentially. I have good reason to believe that the main attraction is electricity, piped by a vast network of extension cords from the shelters that have it. Shelter sink water may matter, too, not so much as a bonus, but making up for Woodland Park's desperate shortage of working water fountains.
This changed my approach to photography. Surely you remember, dear Diary, that I prefer to show you only pictures that include no other people, and also no homeless people's tents. I couldn't photograph most of these shelters without breaking both of these rules. What I eventually settled on was that I could break them only from a distance. You'll see what that means.
I'll cover these shelters from north to south. I found basically three models for these shelters. Some appear to be inhabited. Some appear to be kept clear of residents, instead shared as a sort of kitchen among those living in nearby tents. And I found one, with neither sink nor electrical outlet, empty.
Shelter 6
This is a very large shelter way up at the park's north end, and the department's price to rent it reflects that, $310 per day. It's closest to the northernmost restrooms, and the lawn bowling greens those restrooms serve. My understanding is that those restrooms are seasonal, and may by now have closed; however, the restrooms of the Small Craft Center in Green Lake Park aren't far. The only working water fountain in the upper, western half of Lower Woodland Park is right outside this shelter's door, but of course I don't know whether it's still running.
It was, on October 7, much the most homelike of the shelters. It was crowded with furniture and fabric, most of its unwalled sides blocked, but all in a reasonably consistent and uncluttered way. I was totally unsurprised that the person who greeted me was a woman. I certainly didn't ask her whether she hogged the shelter's amenities, whatever they were, or supervised their sharing among the nearby residents, but those struck me as the possibilities.
In this photo, the shelter is not the white structure at mid-right, but the brown one, obscured by trees, just above the picture's centre. (The white structure, roofless, is useless as shelter.)
I observed signs of trash piling up along the way to this shelter, and I was surprised. This is also the area where I specifically remember seeing messy tents such as I imagine refugees from Licton Springs would have. They were, in early October, a small minority.
Shelter 5
I'm pretty sure this was, at that time, a shared kitchen; on the evening of October 7 I chatted a bit with people using it until an exceptionally territorial dog came after me, but don't remember getting to any of my questions. It's the most obvious shelter from the main entrance to the area where shelters 4-7 are, what I've called the "hilltop". Which means, of course, that the closest restrooms are those I've called by that name, and they're year-round. (In last year's list of such restrooms, they were called "Pink Palace".) They were also, like Carkeek Park's restrooms, open 24 hours while the driveway gates were shut. The department rents this shelter for $160 per day in normal years.
Shelter 4
I didn't find this shelter, or any further south, in the gathering dark October 7, and didn't encounter any residents October 8, also true the rest of the way. This one appeared to be another shared kitchen. Again, the closest restrooms are the "Pink Palace" hilltop ones; as for water, we're far enough south now that I'm not sure which of the Small Craft Center, shelter 6, or the cloverleaf baseball fields downhill, would be the best choice. The rent here is just $135 per day.
This is where I photographed something I'd observed also at shelter 6: piled up trash. I had then recently posted lots of photos of trash neglected at Cal Anderson Park. In the coming days I'd see more examples at Licton Springs Park and at Bitter Lake Playfield, the latter corroborated by a resident. It's a relief to know that our wise and forethoughtful mayor has asked that the relevant program's budget increase next year.
Shelter 7
This is the empty and amenity-free shelter. It's the furthest from the road of these four, and has much more seating than shelters 4 or 5; that seems to be a criterion for price, which here is $185 per day. So in the extremely improbable case that a homeless person looking for a place to sit by day were somewhere near this shelter, it might be a reasonable place to try. Of course, in the intervening month and a half, it could have passed into some sort of use.
These four shelters are those of northwest Lower Woodland Park, and are easiest reached from West Green Lake Way. A gravel path connects the area with that where shelters 1-3 are, but the usual entrance for those southwestern shelters is off 50th St onto a loop called Woodland Ave. Shelters 2 and 3 are on the more obvious branch of that loop, from which I didn't see shelter 1 at all; shelter 1's branch of the loop is east of there.
The parks department rents each of the three out, in normal years, for $135 per day. All three are nearest the southwestern restrooms, year-round ("50th St" in last year's list) and 24-hour this past summer while the gates were closed.
Shelter 2
My first reaction to this shelter's layout was that it was clearly one person's place, but now I'm not so sure; judge for yourself.
(Note the absence of bed and bedding, in particular; also the desk is too bare to bother setting up unless it were to be shared, maybe.)
Shelter 1
This time I wasn't any more sure then than I am now.
My guess was, shared; but I didn't rule out a single occupant, and am not now sure it wasn't vacant. This is the most isolated of the southwestern shelters, as 7 is of the northwestern.
Shelter 3
I found this, um, shared, but not the way shelters 4 and 5 are.
In case you can't see the photo clearly, two tents occupy most of the shelter's area.
Which is a selfishly dispiriting end to this tour, isn't it, dear Diary? I'm sorry. For what it's worth, near as I can tell, none of the remaining shelters of North Seattle, covered in the next and final page of this set, were inhabited, when I visited, by people either communal-minded or selfish.
This page is about picnic shelters within a reasonable hike from UW, plus Magnuson Park's shelters because it didn't make sense to put them anywhere else. In fact, since the one at Gas Works Park is the most impressive, I'll build up by starting with Magnuson.
Magnuson Park
Magnuson Park has three picnic shelters, which all have some similarities: they're crowded with picnic tables, have tilted roofs, and are so much used day and night that I had to set off at dawn to get decent photos.
Shelter 1 is near the beach and its restrooms.
This rents for $320 per day. Location, location, location.
Shelter 2 is down the coast, not far from the burned-out restrooms.
It's a steal at $195 per day.
Finally, shelter 3 is near the playground. Every afternoon I've been in this park, this shelter has been in use by people working with children, and they were already setting up when I took this photo before 9 A.M., but if you manage to beat them out for a reservation, it's $220 per day.
Aside from the difficulty of reaching Magnuson Park in the first place, it would be just about impossible to socially distance in any shelter there for any length of time, so I can't recommend these despite their copious benches.
Well, but there's sort of an exception on two sides: less crowded, but also less seating. Magnuson Park has some sort of environmental thingummy down in its southeast, not far south of where 65th St ends, and it has a peculiar sort of shelter:
This one isn't rentable, or at least not through the same procedures as the others.
View Ridge Playfield
View Ridge Playfield has a picnic shelter smack in the middle of its playground: fancy equipment east and northeast, swings west, and a sandbox within the shelter itself. (Maybe it was intended to hold sand to extinguish coals, but its actual use is as a sandbox.) I've spent several nights there, at first to placate my neighbour at the Northeast branch, then after the library's benches were gone. I've also spent one rainy day there, before I'd fully armed my cart against this different rainy season.
It definitely doesn't have electricity. I'm not sure about a sink, but if one's there, it isn't running. (EDIT 11/24: There isn't.) I owe the parks department $185 for my day spent taking refuge there; I hope they can wait. I'm the only homeless person I've encountered there, which baffles me, given the 24-hour restrooms and the convenience of shopping nearby.
It requires a strategy similar to the one I used at Golden Gardens, and suggested for Ravenna, Parks. That is, since most of the floor gets wet when it rains seriously, one has to keep one's possessions off it.
The shelters of Wallingford, at Meridian Playground and especially Gas Works Park, are much more substantial buildings, and pretty much made for homeless habitation. I have years of extremely intermittent history with Gas Works's shelter, and only remember finding it empty once. Although I only met Meridian's this year, I've seen it not only to write you, dear Diary, but because when my phone was stolen I had to go to Wallingford several times, and it's been inhabited every time.
Meridian Playground
This is a big building, but it's open on its long sides, which makes it less sheltering than the Gas Works shelter; signs of habitation are usually strongest on the short sides, north and south. I'm not sure it has electricity, but I've seen inhabitants using phones with abandon, which suggests it might. I'm making it sound like an inferior model, but if I'd been in time, I might have wanted to claim space here myself.
For this vast space, the parks department wants $310 per day.
Gas Works Park
This is the second-most substantial shelter in North Seattle. On its long south side and part of its short west side, walls alternate with doors and windows to other parts of the (previously industrial) building. So I've repeatedly found tents in this shelter, concentrated southwest, over the years.
I don't have a rich fund of stories about the place - last time I was there, men were breaking up a pallet to fuel a grill, how's that? Not really my kind of place, especially since I'm very dubious as to where their water is coming from. But there's a sense in which it's elite this year. Electricity, 24-hour restroom, plenty of sturdy seating...
For some reason, the Blogspot program is absolutely certain that any text I put after any of these photos has to be a caption. So I'll have to note here, before the photos, that the parks department divides the shelter east (rentable shelter 1, $160 per day) and west (shelter 2, $210), apparently on the grounds that 2 has more built-in picnic tables. And it'll take me a little while to get ready to write the next page, about the seven! shelters of Woodland Park. Have a good time, dear Diary, until then.
Oh, now it'll let me put normal text here! I was going to caption this photo something like this: Gas Works Park's picnic shelter is so sturdy, even the grill has its own roof.
