A Hike along Difficult Market Street

Dear Diary,

Yesterday I checked my lists of places to go, based on the 2020 Seattle real property report, versus the list of fire stations,  the map of libraries, and of course especially the list of P-Patches offered by the respective departments.  The only difference I found was the one that had triggered this check, Troll's Knoll P-Patch.  Thus fortified, I went to my next region without even checking the list of landmarks I'd been offered, let alone tackling the websites of Seattle Public Utilities or Seattle City Light.

This region consists of NW, that is, Seattle west of 1st Ave NW, between the Ship Canal and a northern border.  That northern border starts at 1st Ave NW and NW 50th St and continues along NW 50th St to the intersection with NW Market St.  It then continues along NW Market St to that street's end, and then along the same line to the coast.

So this is, roughly, southern Ballard.  Some people call the eastern part of it part of Fremont,

 

and I'll suggest another name for that area in the next page, but I think most people think all NW is Ballard, and even on a historical basis, most of this area (though I'm not sure about the area covered in the hike this page is about) is the southern part of the brief-lived separate city of Ballard annexed to Seattle in 1907.

It isn't easy to find via a Google search when the eastern parts of Market Street were built, but whenever it was, the builders had to solve the problem of traversing Phinney Ridge.  Their solution resulted in a lot of sheer slopes along the north side of the northern sidewalk.  In some cases the purchasers of houses purchased those sheer slopes too, but along a fairly high proportion of those blocks, the city ended up owning the slopes, noting that each of the parcels into which it divides them up is a "difficult building site".

And if these are typical of the "difficult building site"s, then I no longer wonder why they aren't used to house the homeless.

Most of these sites have amazingly low ID numbers - 62, 63, 64, 66, 68 and, um, 4593 - despite their relative unimportance to the city.

I clambered around a bunch of blocks for about forty-five minutes in order to locate these sites, and it was, all in all, a sorry display of my geographical incompetence.  I'll spare you all that, dear Diary, and just present the results in order from southeast to northwest, ending with one weird site that isn't difficult at all.

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

 

One reason I had trouble finding these is that whoever assigned these parcels street numbers exercised remarkable ingenuity giving them confusing ones.  Two, in fact, have such nonsensical street numbers that I thought they were properties claimed in the middle of Puget Sound:  5300 NW 53rd St and 4709 NW Market St.  What I should have done, what a more competent geographer would have done, with these and with the six photographed below, is assume that they all gravitated to the most obvious place and worked from there.  Anyway, those two are on the above map (approximately) as lower-case g and h, and I'll get to them someday.

The documents (5300, 4709) that located those two sites for me also said that the current version of Market Street was built in 1946.  I found those documents through a Google search that led me to this portal.

Parcel at 104 NW 47th

This one comes first in that real property report because its current use is given as "Excess right-of-way".  It's also first geographically, in this direction, but I didn't grasp that when planning the trip, and this was actually the last site covered in this page to which I went.  Its area is reputed to be 1,871 square feet.  Here's a picture:

Parcel at 180 NW Market St

Three of them are clustered near the bottom of page 3 of the report with the current use given as "Slope protection".  This one is 2,171 square feet.  A picture:

Parcel at 201 NW 50th St

Because I approached via 50th St, this is the first one I visited.  It's another of the three "Slope Protection" sites, area 1,468 square feet.  A picture:

Parcel at 5023 Baker Ave NW

This one's area is given as 1,013 square feet, its current use as "Landscaping".  A picture from across Market:

Parcel at 280 NW Market St

This is the last of the three "Slope protection" sites, area 3,867 square feet, making it much the biggest site on this page.  It's the only one of these six sites actually south of Market, even though its street number implies it's north (the property on the corner of 3rd Ave NW and NW Market St is 232 NW Market).  A picture from across Market:

Parcel at 400 NW Market St

This is a small area separated by a fence from the houses adjacent.  For some reason the city continues to own it, current use "Landscaping", although it isn't a difficult building site at all; I can't help imagining warring neighbours.  It's big enough for multiple tents - 3,651 square feet - and Gilman Playground was indeed recently swept, but I didn't find anyone there.  A picture, again, from across Market:

Three or four parks of similar size are in the small neighbourhood between roughly NW 55th St, NW Market St, and NW 50th St - Greenwood Triangle, Rainier Place, Sunset Place and the alleged Cascade Place.  Not much further north is Ballard Parkway, one of the parks so designated by the Seattle Department of Transportation but not by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  And Sunset Place has a water fountain.  But I predict that that water fountain is on, because it was on during the spring and summer of last year, so it has little potential to affect my conclusions.  One name for the neighbourhood is West Woodland Park.  And I was fed up enough with hills, by the time I was done with difficult Market St, to be fully content to leave that area in the region north of this one.

All for now, dear Diary.  Next, but not immediately after this page, a hike in Ross.