A Visit to Little Brook Park

Dear Diary,

Today I'll try to tell you about my hikes on Monday, May 10, three days ago.  The first of these was kind of a flop; I had two places to visit within a few blocks of each other in northern Lake City, but one was just a landscaping "snippet" I couldn't identify.  So only Little Brook Park is the subject here.  Map:

Little Brook Park is a park of just under an acre in size.  It's basically one lot, facing east, so it's longer east-west than north-south.  At the front (east) end, there's the restroom, the water fountain, and a sign.  Behind these is the playground.  Behind that is the lawn.  And in the back is the titular Little Brook, which people who eat spaghetti pasta, as opposed to, say, spaghetti pudding or spaghetti ribs, insist on calling Little Brook Creek.

North Seattle parks have two restroom buildings doubtless purchased as a set, but not installed that way.  Instead, one went to Little Brook Park, the other to Greenwood Park.  These buildings have many flaws - they aren't winter-safe, they're so designed that the easiest place to store a lock while they're unlocked makes it so the user can't even latch, let alone lock, the door, and they have ventilation holes through which it isn't difficult to take cell phone photos.  (Greenwood Park is busier, so it would be harder to get away with doing this there; at Little Brook, not only are fewer people around, but there's convenient screening shrubbery in the relevant area.)  To a first approximation, then, women would only use these rooms as a last resort.  In Greenwood Park there's also a "sanican", plus Greenwood Park is only a few blocks from Sandel Playground, a Fred Meyer, and various other alternatives.  In Little Brook, on the other hand, there's basically no other public restroom or even "sanican" for miles.  And this is the only park restroom in a place that can reasonably be considered Lake City.  But I've ranted about all this to you before, dear Diary, with photos, so this time I concentrated on other things.

First of all, the restroom, for whatever it's worth, wasn't open Monday.  I had a newspaper with me, but stupidly didn't use it in any photos I took that day.  But here's the photo anyway:

A water fountain is attached to this building.  Last May this was the first park water fountain I found running in North Seattle, outside my then-home region of southeastern North Seattle.  However, it wasn't running when I visited in October, let alone in January.  It also wasn't running Monday:

Now, it seems to me that given the number of homeless people in Lake City, the housed neighbours of the only working and accessible water fountain in that area might get a little uptight.  So while it's possible that there's something wrong with the fountain someplace I can't see (and therefore doubt is vandalism), it's also possible that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation just decided to give the neighbours here a break.  It's also possible that this water fountain was shut off at the same time in the middle of summer as the one in Burke-Gilman Playground Park, but then the department just forgot to turn this one back on.  Regardless, this fountain doesn't quite add to the list I'm accumulating of fountains that had worked in October but not in May.

Since one of my goals for this set of hikes is to be photo-positive, and I'd already shown you, dear Diary, a general landscape-from-the-front and a picture of the creek, this time I picked the playground and the picnic tables:

And then went on to my dud landscaping snippet, and from there via NE 135th St to Jackson Park.