Standing Room Only, Part II: Near UW

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry!  Yes, I know this is days later than I thought it would be.  It turns out the only kind of page the Blogger app can handle is a simple one like the first page in this set.  It can't do headings at all, and while it allows photos, if you use more than a few, it trashes everything you've done the next time you leave the app to confirm something.  Anyway, it's taken me until today to get to Wi-Fi and try again.

The motivation for this page can be illustrated by the place I'm writing from, the Northeast branch of the Seattle Public Library.  If you're familiar with the building but haven't visited recently, see if you can figure out what's missing:

No?  Well, here's a hint:

Those post holes are where a fancy bench in memory of Sahir Dibee, 1943-1998, was over the summer, and I would guess long before that.  On that bench, this summer, one of my peers strongly preferred to sleep, and deeply resented my intrusions.  I'm currently sitting on my blanket, on the concrete there.  The simpler bench I sometimes slept on was to the left in the first photo.

I'm sure, if you asked, you'd be told the benches came out to accommodate the lines involved in what this branch misleadingly calls "curbside pickup".  I devoutly hope, when those lines go away because the library re-opens, the benches return.  If they don't, people will probably claim we homeless wrecked this porch for everyone.  Well, look:  this year, we've been allowed to sleep not only in parks, but under limited restrictions on the UW campus.  How would we know the libraries would hold our use of an apparently new freedom against everyone?  So I hope that doesn't happen, hope Sahir Dibee can long be honoured in the same place as before.

Anyway, this page begins my coverage of the rentable picnic shelters, and a couple more, in North Seattle, with just one, the only one genuinely near the UW.

Ravenna Park

I don't claim to know where all the picnic shelters are in North Seattle, but I'm quite sure there are no picnic shelters of any kind in the plethora of parks in the corner defined by I-5 and 60th St except for this rentable one in Ravenna Park.

It doesn't impress me despite this distinction.  In particular, the page's title is far too apt:  This shelter does have a sink (off this year) and a grill that for all I can see might even include an oven, but is otherwise far too lacking in furniture.

I've now slept in several shelters.  If I were trying to sleep here, as at a similar layout in the Golden Gardens Park shelters, I'd put my satchels on the grill and sit there myself, and rely on the cart to keep my other stuff out of the wet.  The photo just above was early in my work on this series of pages, and I was very impressed by the uselessness of this shelter's few walls.  I was wrong:  sure, they are useless, but most rain actually does fall straight enough down that a roof like this really is a big help.

But I'm trying to focus, here, on how few dry alternatives we have to standing by day, and I think we can agree that sitting on that grill would get old fast.  Helpfully, there's no electricity here (not that I checked at every shelter).

Amazingly, in a normal year, the parks department would expect to get $110 per day for that shelter.

Next, with somewhat less talk, the shelters of Magnuson Park, View Ridge Playfield, Meridian Playground, and Gas Works Park.