Another Hike in Wallingford

Dear Diary,

Apparently my using the lyrics to a song for May Day confused people, so I'll try to provide clearer titles.  This page's predecessor is "While Strolling in the Parks One Day", part I.

I've hiked to lists of parks in North Seattle three times before, in May and June 2020, in October, and in January.  In the May and June hikes I was primarily trying to find out how unusual the weird situation I was in locally was:  several restrooms closed all the time, others randomly; two water fountains running, the rest stopped.  What I found was that my then area had almost a monopoly on closed restrooms, but also had two of very few water fountains running in North Seattle.  By October most of the local water fountains had been turned back on; my main concern was to find out how general that was (extremely hit-and-miss, it turned out), but I also looked at rentable and other picnic shelters.  In January I was mostly checking a map of restrooms and "sanican"s purportedly available to the homeless, not all in parks, but also tried many water fountains.

The list of places I went changed each time.  In May and June I went to every park I knew about from the parks department website, and also surveyed the Ballard seacoast with some care.  By October I had found the city of Seattle's 2020 real property report (PDF), and had added a bunch of parks, but also removed a bunch of others that didn't have restrooms or fountains; I also went to available lists of waterways (PDF map and much longer PDF document) and shoreline street ends.  In January I went to far fewer places, but had had a lot longer to study the 2020 report, and also added some non-park places to visit.  My theoretical goal in all this was to establish whether each additional place I went offered either restrooms or water fountains (few did), but all the changes also kept the hikes more interesting to do, whether or not they made my writing more interesting, and allowed me to visit a lot of neat places.

Well, this time it looks probable that there's another water fountain drought, but I don't know yet, so it's back to hiking.  Because I'm now housed, it's more practical for me to make shorter hikes instead of the epic multi-day journeys that accomplished most of the work in the previous rounds.  Because I'm now writing with a laptop, it's easier to keep up with photos, so I'm photographing parks I haven't photographed before, hence re-visiting all the parks (but not, in particular, all the waterways and street ends, of most of which I've shown you, dear Diary, photographs in the past), with the excuse that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation might have installed a water fountain in any park over the year since I last visited many of them.  (Although it very probably hasn't.)

But working with the 2021 real property report has sent me back to the 2020 one.  In January I'd made a list of interesting-looking places from it - vacant lots, major landmarks, places designated "parks" by the Department of Transportation but not by the parks department - but it was January, I was still homeless, and I didn't do anything with that list.  Yesterday I went back through the 2020 report, listing everything I hadn't already that was in North Seattle; it was a shorter list.  I also divvied the parks, P-Patches, and other sites into eleven broad areas.  And today I walked, again, one of those areas, everything between 1st Ave NW and I-5, and between N 50th St and the Ship Canal:  in other words, a reasonable approximation of Fremont and Wallingford.

I've already told you, dear Diary, about my return to the parks of those areas in three pages last Saturday (plus a fourth that tackled Woodland Park, to which I didn't return today).  Today I went back to a few of those parks, finding no changes re restrooms and water fountains, but also went to every other site on my new list.  And this page, and three more to come tonight, are mostly to tell you about those places.  I've picked places to tell you about on several grounds:

• Whether they were, pre-COVID-19, open to the public.
• Whether they're easily seen by the public.
• Whether they offer, or pre-COVID offered, restrooms and/or water fountains to the public.
• How park-like they are.
• How photogenic they are.

In other words, I'm not interested in making it possible for evildoers to destroy our infrastructure by reading you, nor am I going to bore you with all the many puzzling lines in the real property report, dear Diary, but I am interested in turning, especially, P-Patches and public-facing sites for Seattle Public Utilities, from occasional discoveries into things that your pages provide guidance to.

(I'm not broadening this to school district, port, county, state, or federal real property lists, if each of those actually offer them to the public.  So in particular, I'm not, this time, visiting schools and post offices.)

So let's get started.  I'm interpreting Wallingford as the neighbourhood from Stone Way N to I-5 and from the Ship Canal to 50th, but this page doesn't actually cover any of the stuff near the Ship Canal.  I start as before at a large block that includes Meridian Playground, but not quite the same place.

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

Good Shepherd Center

I mentioned this building in the page in which I originally introduced Meridian Playground to you, dear Diary, "A Shower at Green Lake", as originally a home for orphaned and "wayward" girls.  The latter strongly suggests that it was also a sort of prison, and I speculated that their ghosts might haunt the shrouded apple trees in the park.

The Good Shepherd Center is easiest to reach from the east side of the block in which it sits, as the park is from the west or south.  Here's a sign:

 

Here's the building.  The real estate report's listing for Good Shepherd Center makes it out to be immense, over four acres, and I don't know how much of that is the quite large building:

how much the grounds, statelier than the park or Seattle parks in general:

Good Shepherd Center is one of several big old buildings that have been turned into homes for non-profit organisations in North Seattle, and I would assume citywide, but others, such as the University Heights building near where I used to live, aren't in the real property report; this one is.  It appears normally to be open to the public, and has no such sign as U-Heights puts up advertising "No Public Restrooms"; instead there's this:

Those are better hours, weekdays, than the park's restrooms offer.  But of course that's not the current status:

Oh, well.  My assumption is that this'll be the norm, because any place currently allowing the public inside should've been on the map I checked in January.

Anyway...

Good Shepherd P-Patch

In general, I won't have much to say about the P-Patch community gardens, of which many hikes and all my eleven regions include examples.  They all have access to water, and as far as I know all control that water with keys provided to the gardeners.  But they're kind of parkish, they post their own rules for visitors, which obviously means they can and expect to be visited, and as I said, one of my purposes in these hikes is to get clear on the P-Patches.  This one occupies much of the south of the big block.  A photo:

As I left, I confirmed that Meridian Playground's restrooms were open, its water fountain still hopelessly un-useable.

The Wallingford Street Fountain

Each of the "another" pages I'm writing in you tonight, dear Diary, includes one of the three places I had to go back to.  Much of the reason I tried to visit all these other places is just to keep that trip from being a boring slog of hiking to these three rather widely separated places.

Anyway, this is one of the three.  It was the last street fountain known to me to be running, as recently as March (and near as I can tell, it ran most of the winter, hah), but in what appears to me now to be the mayor's latest campaign against water addiction (i.e., against human beings), it isn't running now:

The Seattle Public Library, Wallingford branch

This appears to be in a newer building which was built for civic use, but isn't city-owned.  As a result, the 2021 report, which omits a bunch of parks that aren't city-owned, also omits this library; that kind of thing is the main reason I worked yesterday from the 2020 report.  A view of the library:

The closed doors:

The rest of the building's also-closed doors:

After this, I headed way east and south, verifying on the way that Wallingford Playfield's restrooms were open, its water fountain still not running.  Last time I worried a little that there might be parks in "NE" but west of I-5 that I'd omitted.  There are no parks with such addresses south of 50th St, but there are five other city sites, all near but not on the water.  The next page is about some of those.  Until then, dear Diary.