My Seattle Parks Diary: Before the Ruling at Cal Anderson Park

Dear Diary,

Well, they tell me it's all over, and thankfully no Rachel Corrie today. So now I can show you the photos I took yesterday.

These fall into three groups. I'll start with the messages. When Cal Anderson Park first became a flashpoint, in the days of CHOP and CHAZ, the original Black Lives Matter protestors complained that white activists arriving were diluting the focus to things like saving the whales, say. Well, probably some of the people there yesterday were some of the people those complaints were about, but this time their focus was strict. And ...

This time the focus was on my kind. On me. These people had not come to the park on behalf of whales, or of the transgendered, or of COVID-19 vaccines for poorer countries, worthy though all of those causes are. They had taken the risk of coming to the park, and temporarily unhousing themselves, on behalf of me. How could my heart not sing?

Of course my excuse for being there, if questioned by agents of the city (didn't happen) or by protestors (did), was that I was press. So my next group of photos is of amenities, the things I've been writing about in you all along, dear Diary. This took some doing because most of these were within the barricades, but one thing wasn't:

Despite the traumatic events going on, Cal Anderson remained about as messy as a very messy park, rather than the hellhole I'd documented some months ago. Score one for the kids.

Several photos below depict what I found when I first tried to follow the directions I'd been given for a way through the barricades. But after taking the photo just above, I decided to make one last try. And it turned out the entrances were guarded, by strapping young men able to move substantial obstacles, and I just hadn't found a guard. The one I found at that point apparently decided I was too obviously homeless to be a spy, and shifted a pallet, thus creating a passage this ageing and fattening man barely squeezed through.

The park's older water fountain, of course turned off in mid-December:

The newer, winterised, one:

This was also shut off, but since winterised water fountains in Seattle work by requiring the user to hold the button down for some seconds, no mere photo could depict its being shut off. So I took a video, which, since I've recently been unable to embed videos, can be watched at YouTube.

I trust I don't have to explain these next shots:

However, I do have to mention that I'm not just ignoring the "sanican"s and hand-washing stations out of my usual snobbery. I was puzzled by my inability to find them, but it turns out they'd been removed, so determined was the city to make life miserable for people in that place.

To my mind this calls into question the city's claim that it acted only in response to threats against park workers. Granted those shouldn't happen, but to respond first by removing sanitation, contra CDC guidance, and then removing the campers, ditto - well, that seems much too planned out to have been a knee-jerk response to one incident.

Cal Anderson Park has a category of building I haven't said much to you about, dear Diary, for the sensible reason that they're usually locked, and not just during pandemics. Ironically, they're called "shelterhouses". That day, the one at Cal Anderson Park actually was sheltering people, but I trust this photo gets across the essentials.

Presumably once it's repaired it'll go back to being rented out at an astonishingly low $10/hour - see, it's the fees that keep it out of reach for the likes of me.

Finally, we come to the defences. As I circled these fruitlessly, I began to think that the protestors had read my complaint, in "Cal Anderson Park Is Not a Park", that if the city had really meant to close it they would have fenced it, and had decided to do the job themselves. My first photo, showing the restrooms and main water fountain as close as I expected to get, actually shows a pre-existing fence, of which there are many in the south.