Street Ends: Lake Washington - North

Dear Diary,

It turns out I'd remembered myself as more heroic than I actually am.  On October 20, the day I went to the Morningside Substation Site, aka Wedgwood Community Park, I did get to Matthews Beach, Magnuson Park, and the two street ends in between, but I did not also get several miles further north to the other two street ends this page discusses.  I didn't actually pull that off until the 28th.

That said, I'm circling North Seattle here, so the last shall be first.

Speaking of which.  Several of the pages I've written in you lately have ended on unhappy notes.  Arguably this page will too, but the series as a whole will not.  A sizeable share of the North Seattle street ends that aren't accessible to the public are in this very first page.  In contrast, everything I plan for the last page is wide open.

NE 135th St Street End

Photos taken October 28.

Photo 1 - The street that ends.

Photo 2 - The land area the city is claiming.

NE 130th St Street End

This small beach was introduced under this very name in "Top of the City, Part I" some time ago.  It was in the map adopted in 1993, but is no longer considered part of the street end program, possibly because it's been transferred to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Photo 1

 Photo 2

Photo 3 - The view over the water

Fair warning:  I don't think there's that much blue in the sky in any of the rest of the photos 3.

University Lake Shore Place

As long as I was up there, I thought I should photograph this pretentiously named bit of slope over the Burke-Gilman Trail.

I don't actually know that the bench is in this "park" rather than the trail.

The rest of the photos are from October 20.

NE 90th Place Street End

Photo 1

Photo 2

The city says this street end is adjacent to Matthews Beach.  If you look closely, you can see what I think is a storage area.  Assuming the resident of that house is paying the fee required for use of a street end, what that person is really paying for is not storage space but privacy.  The city has considerately left the southern end of the park nearly impassable with vegetation and streams, but someone still considered it necessary to put up a fence:

NE 85th St Street End

In several places in North Seattle, street signs are posted without actual streets to point to.  At least some of these amount to claims of street ends.

Photo 1

Well, hmmm.  I didn't actually take notes on either the 20th or the 28th, so have had to reconstruct my movements mostly from the photos' order, and only after first writing this page in you, dear Diary, did I realise that this photo probably represents the ending of the real easternmost NE 85th St, visited sort of on the way north.

Photo 2

Just keep in mind, dear Diary, that the fees presumably paid by the people using some of the street ends are what pays for the upkeep of the rest, and even this ending needn't really be unhappy.

Actually, well, I was in Matthews Beach that day, and it's a lot harder to be unhappy, I always think, around ducks.