Standing Room Only, Part III: Less Near UW

Dear Diary,

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.