A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part I

Dear Diary,

From Licorice Fern Natural Area on NE 130th St, I went south to NE 125th St, and then east.  My first stop was the only Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park in North Seattle that I knew about but didn't visit last year.

Map:

Thornton Creek Addition

Google Maps is quite sure where this park's address - 2318 NE 125th St - is, and who's there:  the Food Distribution Center of Greater Seattle Cares.  Actually, as Google Search knows, that center's address is 2212 NE 125th St.  Google Maps doesn't have a clue who's at 2212, but knows it's the address of, well, this park.  Whatever.

Google Search is right, and Google Maps is wrong.

Although if the food distribution people were never here, I don't know why I found three abandoned shopping carts on the premises.

Regardless, the parks department didn't want this property for its building, which according to Redfin is a 3-bedroom house prone to flooding.  Rather, for its frontage on the North Fork of Thornton Creek:

Of course, it also comes with a lawn.

I hope they don't just tear down the building - if nothing else, it contains three restrooms - and kind of hope, given that Lake City is pretty under-parked, they don't turn this nearly-an-acre site into Yet Another Thornton Creek Natural Area.  But they only bought it in 2019; time will tell.

Virgil Flaim Park

The parks department website comes through again.  Virgil Flaim was a Lake City resident who ran the Lake City Community Center for twenty years.  I don't know when the community centers became parks department properties, so don't know whether he was a department employee, but anyway, good for them for naming this park for him.

Since I've shown you pictures of this park before, dear Diary, I didn't worry too much about taking more this time; also, it was fairly crowded.  It has a water fountain, which is running:

and I took a couple of pictures of the greensward to show that there isn't a restroom being built there yet:

Albert Davis Park

The parks department website gives Davis, who definitely wasn't an employee, a long paragraph as a Lake City civic leader.

This park was the site of an encampment from before I first saw it last May (when the campers appeared to me mostly black), on through January (when they were considerably more mixed in race), to Thursday, May 6, one week ago, when it was swept largely in response to incidents the previous Thursday (and Friday).  Two people were shot (but survived), one of them in his RV adjacent to the camp, the other at an unrevealed location; if the identity or identities of the shooter or shooters is or are known, it's news to me.  But the Friday incident was a fire sparked by propane use at the park itself, which makes associating it with the park rather more obvious.

Seattle has a pattern that I doubt is unique to it, but that I've observed more here than elsewhere perhaps because I've been homeless so long here.  That is, some location gets associated with a lot of issues - violence, fires, drug dealers, prostitution, loud arguments, litter, you name it.  The city responds by, essentially, blaming the location.  What I don't understand is why city leaders, who ought to be wiser than I am, can't grasp that some poor people have a lot of issues.  If they don't want such people's places to become problematic, they shouldn't concentrate those people in one place; but because nobody wants poor neighbours, for precisely this reason, and also because they can't pay for one-acre lots, poor people get concentrated.  And so in location after location, Something Must Be Done, or at least Shoved Off To Somewhere Else.  The problem of sweeps is by no means limited to the homeless.  The SRO I lived in for nearly six years is closed to this day because faulty wiring caused a fire over five years ago.  (Though an employee told me it was because an alcoholic fell asleep while smoking.)  The building appears to be fine (the fire was after I was evicted, so I'm only going by what I see from outside), but nearly forty housing units are lost.  And then there's the Everspring Inn, to coverage of whose closure (initiated by the Seattle Police Department) I've put links into you before, dear Diary, but here are some more:  Crosscut, The Seattle Times.  Even if all the homeless were shot down tomorrow, this pattern would persist, and because of it, there would be more homeless soon enough.

Anyway, there are two important differences between park sweeps conducted by the Navigation Team and those conducted by the parks department.  The parks department has consistently been giving notice, and it gets the places it sweeps clean.  These are not unconnected:  if notice is given, the sweeps have fewer campers to deal with, and less difficulty making the distinction between valuable property and trash, a distinction homeless people are always going to make differently from how housed city employees do.

But that cleanliness meant that for the first time, I could take pictures in Albert Davis Park, so that's what I did.  Only not in the park, because after I'd walked across it, I found this sign:

It took a deal of work to photograph the fine print there at the lower right corner, but I did it:

So I only took pictures from the sidewalk outside the park.

In all the excitement, I completely forgot this park's water fountain, so I came back Wednesday, and hope to tell you, dear Diary, about that tomorrow.  Today I still have a lot to tell and show you, starting with the rest of the block Albert Davis Park is in.