A Hike Near the I-5 Bridge

Dear Diary,

This page is sort of an example of a bait-and-switch.  I told you last night that I visited five city properties near I-5 yesterday.  First of all, this wasn't quite true.  I found out when starting to write this page that I'd skipped one, so I went back and looked at it last night.  It's photogenic, and visible to the public; but it has no door that opens to the public, let alone restrooms or water fountains that do, it has no trees or homeless people, and it's part of our infrastructure.

I also didn't find one, a sewer property.  Seattle Public Utilities builds some extremely parklike areas (we'll get to one in the next page), but also lists some things in the real property report that just can't be seen at all.

And one was really boring.  Just to establish that I can be trusted on this subject, I'll tell you about it this time and show you a picture, dear Diary, but in general, I intend to skip such sites.

So that's three of the five that this page will show photos of.  Let's get started.

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

Snippet at 398 NE 40th St

I'm already finding that most of the properties listed as "snippet"s, used for "landscaping", aren't really findable.  This one is supposed to be 658 square feet near the corner of 4th Ave NE and NE 40th St.  I thought there were two candidates, and took pictures of both.  Google Maps claims to know which of the two it is, but I suspect it's lying about knowing, and I think the other more probable.

In general, then, I'll skip the "snippet"s, but as it happens, both of these candidates are parklike and photogenic, so here's my candidate:

There's a building at the corner whose street number is on 4th Ave NE, and there's a building to the left, but between that building's garage and the other building's landscaping there's an area with different vegetation, and no building, but tall trees, behind it.  I think it's probably around the right size, and it's in the right place.

However, NE 40th St is divided there by a steep slope (crossing the divider involves stairs), and the other possibility is that this property represents part of the median.  It can't represent all of it, because that median is considerably more than 658 square feet, but anyway, here's Google Maps's candidate:

From there I went south.

University Satellite Yard

This is a surplus Seattle City Light property at 3814 4th Ave NE.  When I compiled my first list in January, I focused on "vacant", "underutilized", and "difficult building site" properties in particular, because I couldn't help wondering why they weren't used to house homeless people.  Well, um, ...

Now, if one looks up Nickelsville Northlake, one finds that they got a reprieve, and are due to move out in June.  Hence:

But if one looks more closely, it turns out that that was June of 2020.  I have no idea whether this tiny house village - no, not a tent city - now has a scheduled move date or not.  Here's their website for what more information it offers.

Anyway, though, I should've had more faith in the city this time.

SDOT Parking and Landscape Area

Part of the parking lot east of Ivar's is actually city property.  It's a fairly large property by real property report standards, and it does include a bit of landscaping, but it really isn't very interesting.  I intend to leave most such things out going forward, but figured this page would be a bit less of a bait and switch if I left it in as an example of what I consider boring.

While trying to figure out which property was meant, I went as far east as North Passage Point and as far west as the Latona Ave Street End.

OK, that's it for this part of the hike.  I then trudged west a ways for the next "another" hike, which I'll describe after I have breakfast.  Until then, dear Diary.