What's in a Name?

Dear Diary,

Going Sunday to visit some of the more prominent parks of northeast Seattle reminded me of something I'd more or less forgotten:  my imagining a hierarchy of park naming.

I don't know of a North Seattle Parks and Recreation park that goes by only one name, like Madonna.  They're all two or more, a specific name and a more general, vaguely classifying, one.

I spent some sleepless time two nights ago classifying the parks in my list by their second names.  Last night I added their "amenities" as listed by the department on their web pages, and today (um, the 5th) their areas in acres.

I wasn't surprised that "Park" was the clear champion, 46 not counting one "Mini Park" and two "Pocket Park"s.  The runners up are all clustered in a group, "Natural Area", "Place", "Playfield", and "Playground", ten to twelve each.

My imagined hierarchy is Park sometimes > Playfield > Playground > Place.  So let's take "Natural Area" first.  Weirdly, the department reserves this, in North Seattle, for Thornton Creek and its tributaries, ten of the eleven.  The only exception is Pipers Creek Natural Area.  Which is a reminder that parks' names are partly political.  In this case, Pipers Creek is sometimes set up as a northwestern equivalent to Thornton Creek.

Parks about other streams need other names.  Thornton Creek grabs some of these too - Inverness Ravine Park, Victory Creek Park, Mock Creek Ravine.  But a park near the surviving mouth of Yesler Creek is Union Bay Boglands, then there's Ravenna Ravine (actually an unnamed tributary to Ravenna Creek) and no fewer than four parks in northwestern Seattle on four different creeks - Crown Hill Glen, North Beach Ravine, North Beach Park and Llandover Woods Greenspace.

This is counting only parks that, well, feel like Natural Areas.  Victory Creek Park recently had picnic tables and a playground, but today its main concession to the lazy is a single bench.  It wasn't clear how to allocate other parks.  In Little Brook and Ravenna Parks, the titular streams can be seen, but is that fair to Victory Heights Playground, whose stream has vanished?

Anyway.  The hierarchy.

"Place"s really stand out.  They're small, and they have few or no symbolised amenities.  Belvoir Place in turn looks different on both counts - at .42 acres it's by far the biggest, and it has two amenities listed, a waterway for hand-carried boats and a view.  The rest are all below .25 acres, and only two have even one amenity listed - Bergen Place's art (yuck) and Sunset Place's water fountain.  The views from Sunset Place and the Blue Ridge Places, all of which I've shown you, dear Diary, are not listed, so that's a reminder that the lists of amenities aren't infallible.

Size isn't a reliable guide to these classifications either, except when it is.  No "playfield" or "playground" in North Seattle is below a quarter acre.  Most "place"s are, also all three "circle"s (all of which really are more or less traffic circles), both "pocket park"s and the "mini park", and both "triangle"s and the "square" that's really a triangle.

But that leaves ten other very small parks.  I won't list all of them, but half have all sorts of names, including Marvin's Garden and the Wallingford Steps, and half are "park"s, including Peace Park and Thyme Patch Park.  Most of the "place"s don't matter much to me, but the kids of one neighbourhood would really miss Wedgwood Square, the students of another Christie Park, and I'd be sorry never to have seen Pinehurst Pocket Park.

All the parks I failed to find - one of the Blue Ridge Places, Cascade Place and Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area - are under a quarter-acre.  Good to know there are limits to my visual difficulties.

Anyway, moving on.  All "playground"s in North Seattle are rather bigger.  Most are between 2 and 4 acres; Meridian is twice 4, though, and Pinehurst and Victory Heights a little less than 2.  All but one have playgrounds; the exception, Sacajawea Playground, has the playground of Sacajawea Elementary School next door listed as an amenity to conform it.  All except Froula and Sacajawea have water fountains; nearly half have restrooms (although those at Ross aren't listed among its amenities).

Which brings me to southern Ballard.  I found "Ross Playground", as listed at the parks department website, billing itself as "Ross Playfield" on its scoreboard, "Ross Park" on its main sign.  I was sold.  I'll note that its list of amenities, once bolstered not only by its restrooms but also by the art (the mosaic) I keep having trouble photographing, is more than adequate to a park its size.

"Gilman Playground" is more problematic.  On first seeing it, primed by the instability of Ross's name, I thought "This is obviously a playfield."  I meant its focus on sports - it lists the most sports as amenities, baseball, basketball, soccer and tennis, among North Seattle's playgrounds - and the sheer blandness I find in all playfields.  At the time I conceived this conspiracy theory:  "Ballard residents won't let Ross and Gilman move up to their rightful places in the hierarchy because Ballard Playground is only a playground."  More seriously, Gilman as a playfield would be the smallest, just under 4 acres, except for the parks that are playfields by virtue of being high schools' playfields (Ingraham and Nathan Hale).

As for Meridian Playground, in hierarchy terms it can't move up because it has no sports except a minimal concession to basketball, but it's easily as rich an experience as many official parks.  I dunno.  I don't live near any of these three, and I don't know the real politics of their names.  It seems obvious that people have recurringly been unsatisfied to call Ross a "playground", but beyond that?

It's obviously time to move on.  "Playfield"s are, as suggested above, bigger, except for Ingraham Playfield (.8 acres) and presumably Nathan Hale Playfield (whose area I don't know).  (In fact, let's please leave these two, which don't have parks department web pages, out of all the rest of this.)  Wallingford is the smallest of the rest in North Seattle, at 4 1/2 acres; Loyal Heights, 6 2/3, is next.  Meadowbrook, 18 1/2, is the biggest.  All have restrooms and water fountains, although Dahl's fountain isn't listed among its amenities, and some of the restrooms are technically in community centers (which are, in turn, in the playfields).

They all offer multiple sports, though at least in their web pages' lists of amenities, arguably none exceed Gilman's four.  (Depends on the definition of "sport".)  All list baseball except Wallingford.  I'd thought "playfield" status demanded baseball diamonds, so I did some digging.  At a community website, in the 23rd comment, by "gregf", beginning "Since the field area was created in 1970", is a historical take on Wallingford Playfield's field, and how the parks department has apparently pushed to turn it more specific (probably for baseball).  Let's hear it for the bland!

So maybe it's obvious by now that this page is really more about memories than about names, and why do the playfields give me so few meaningful memories?  Obviously, I didn't play sports in them growing up, nor since.  I did play Little League as a child, and think I must have had fun, but don't in the least associate that with the Milwaukee parks involved.  I remember ultimate frisbee in college much more vividly, but nobody needs a specially marked space for ultimate; we used the Midway, which is in fact a Chicago park, but of which I have many more memories than just sporting ones.

North Seattle's playfields, as I've mentioned more than once to you, dear Diary, try to show individuality in their playgrounds, ironic in terms of the notional hierarchy by which playfields should care more about other things.  Soundview is so much the winner in this as to shade all the rest, and although I've offered photos of Wallingford's, Meadowbrook's and Laurelhurst's playgrounds in my desperate search for "neat stuff" at each, surely, dear Diary, you remember the joy with which I greeted Laurelhurst's firepit and bridge, and the creeks at Dahl and Meadowbrook, as actual differences?  I suppose my brief enthusiasms for those creeks foreshadowed "Land and Water".

What is clear is that I haven't really been fair to parks' sporting aspects, and to whatever extent I write about parks after you, dear Diary, I ought to try to do better.  I suppose at least leaving team sports out of you enhances your credibility as a record of the pandemic, though.

When I think about it, this ignoring goes beyond the playfields.  I've repeatedly told you, dear Diary, about the bowl in Ravenna Park that's even lower than the "lower" restrooms, about its purple paving stone, concerts in it, and its outlet from the park's ravine, but I've never mentioned, have I, that it's actually a baseball diamond?  I seem to have mentioned actual sporting contests - soccer at Cal Anderson Park, tennis at Laurelhurst, softball at Ravenna - primarily as opportunities to ogle players.  Sheesh.

Anyway, as this implies, some North Seattle "park"s can be seen as improved playfields, lending support to my idea of a hierarchy.  Some big parks do this on steroids; Magnuson Park, the biggest, lists sixteen amenities, including baseball, soccer and tennis.  But some don't:  Carkeek Park lists only hiking, if one considers that a sport.  Only seven of the 46 list baseball (Cowen, Green Lake, Magnuson, Maple Leaf, Northacres, Ravenna, Woodland).

So really, this hierarchy is looking pretty shaky by now.  I thought the less sporting "park"s won that title by strong individuality - places like Fremont Canal and Fremont Peak, or Peace, or Ballard Corners.  But then what do we do about the recipe for a Seattle park I concocted after first seeing Cedar and Little Brook:  "Take a playground, add a grassy area, and there you are."

"Park" isn't just the "Smith" of parks.  It's more common, and it more often really points to an actual smith.  That is, of the 46, quite a few either have lots of amenities, or strong individuality.  But "park" is also the "Smith" of parks.  And politically, it's the obvious way to keep up with the Joneses.  I'm sure several of the "park"s made by my recipe got that title because the park in the next neighbourhood already had it.

So I think "place", "playground", and "playfield" are real categories with real definitions.  I don't know whether, elsewhere in Seattle, "natural area" is such a category; here it's been captured by Thornton Creek.  "Park" is not such a category.

What about the little categories?

There are more "boulevard"s not just in Seattle, but in the parks department's list of parks, than Ravenna.  There are more "garden"s than Marvin's, though I suspect they all mean the word more vegetatively.  There are more "mini park"s than Lake City, more "plaza"s than University Heights, more "viewpoint"s than NW 60th St; there is even one more "greenspace" than Llandover Woods.

Burke-Gilman is of course not the only "trail" in Seattle, but for some reason it's the only one listed as a Seattle park on the department website.  Similar for "boglands" and Union Bay, "glen" and Crown Hill, "homestead" and Hubbard, "loop" and Cheshiahud Lake Union, "open space" and Bitter Lake Reservoir, and "steps" and Wallingford.

Out of many, many.  I started you, dear Diary, with a warning about lying to you, but there's a sense in which I've been lying to you all along.  I am not in fact the biggest fan of our current mayor.  I adopted that pose as a satirical device, which maybe makes the lying OK, but it became harder and harder to maintain the more I wrote about Cal Anderson Park.

So take this business of closing the big parks entirely on holidays, and early at other times, with the exhortation that Seattle has hundreds of other parks.  From a public health standpoint this is dubious.  The big parks offer more room for social distancing than the small, but they also offer more room for crowds and superspreader events.

But although my father was an epidemiologist, I am not; I write, at the moment, about parks.  And the mayor's advice was more right than wrong.  As this epidemic drags on, Seattle does have many outdoor places worth visiting.  Yes, it takes more love for parks than I can muster to find something special about Corliss Place, but that's more the exception than the rule.  I've mentioned a lot of interesting parks in this page, and in your pages in general, dear Diary, and I hope, if it ever stops raining, that anyone who reads you will explore some of them.  Good night.