Details of southern NE Seattle, part II

Dear Diary,

This page is for the rest of yesterday's hike.  As in previous pages, photos of open or closed restroom doors (actually, open for the remaining parks), and running or inert water fountains (actually, inert for the remaining parks), are in a public folder at my Google Drive, URL:

<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cfrNdJI9NVY3ux7OoGI7B8Vg3Klq3liT?usp=sharing>

Also, as in all the hikes with these boring page titles, I tried to remember to test each restroom I could legitimately enter by drawing water in the sink and trying to make it splash me, then trying to use any dryer available to dry off.  I only mention these tests when I forgot them, or when either sink, dryer or both behaved badly.

Christie Park

Last year, this expanded park opened with a running water fountain.  This year it's more ordinary.

It's quite a long way to the next park - Christie Park is at 9th Ave NE and NE 43rd St, Laurelhurst Playfield at 45th to 48th Avenues NE and NE 41st to 45th Streets.  So I digressed quite a bit along the way.

First I went to

University Temple

This building, besides being a church, hosted an amazing number of non-profits, including the Roots shelter for young homeless people.  Since Roots offered showers, eventually it also hosted the University District location of the Urban Rest Stop.  It's a gorgeous old building, and I'm kind of amazed it didn't get landmarked as a way to stop its demolition, but while photographs of it are fairly numerous online, photos of the board on NE 43rd St that listed all the non-profits, which I found almost as inspiring as the soaring steeple, don't seem to be online.  I'll put one here if I'm still able.

Anyway, it's been fenced in, though it's not yet the pile of rubble I predicted in April it would take for certain parties to admit that it's gone.

Here's the Urban Rest Stop's doorway, still standing but no longer accessible for the four shower rooms and one additional restroom still offered by the charity's website (though at least they no longer pretend that this location has a meaningful calendar, as they did until recently; unfortunately, the Internet Archive doesn't preserve the calendar, and I wasn't mean enough to take a screenshot) - um, right, and also still offered by the lying map I spent January hiking to check.  As I said, here's that doorway:

And here's the water fountain I treated as a street fountain, but which is obviously on private property, and probably a private fountain offered by this very long generous church.  The fountain lacked a drainpipe all last year, but still ran until winter.

The University of Washington Campus

This is where I spent most of my days, and many of my nights (awake) from September 2014 to February 2020, mostly indoors during the days and evenings.  I also spent most of my days and quite a few of my nights (awake and asleep) here from April 2020 to January 2021, when not hiking for you, dear Diary, or for my own survival, mostly outdoors at all times.  I looked at both the benches on which I spent most of the latter months, but was much more interested in the five buildings through which I could spend 365 days per year inside.  None of those buildings is yet admitting the general public.  Two are clearly open to random undergrads - Suzzallo Library and the Husky Union Building.  The latter is also open to invited members of the general public, and perhaps to customers (with appointments) of the few open businesses.  One of the buildings I haven't publicly named is open to students who have specific business there, through faculty members' intervention.  The other two (Savery Hall and the other I haven't named) are officially not open at all, which means they're open to those who have offices in them.

I'm going to steal a punchline from what I'd intended to be one of your last pages, dear Diary, because in the present situation it's morally unconscionable to continue to keep this to myself.  The UW campus's outdoors is largely a cascade of parks, interrupted mostly by buildings and parking lots, but despite the huge area covered when one adds all these parks up, it's like all other private parks known to me in North Seattle.  It offers no restrooms with doors that open to the outside, and no outdoor water fountains.  It should be ashamed of itself, what with the vast amount of construction it's been doing during this pandemic, that it has done nothing to change that.  I'm told that bags full of human Number Two can often be found in an underground parking area as a result.

I have to qualify this punch line a slight bit.  East of Sakuma Viewpoint, at Brooklyn Ave NE and NE Boat St, which the University claims as a park and the City claims as a street end, is a restaurant called Agua Verde Cafe.  Back behind this restaurant are its restrooms, which have doors that open to the outside.  They also have locks, which are the push-button kind.  Employees reputedly have to escort people to those restrooms, and when I first went there, the restaurant was closed for the holidays.

The doors were definitely locked on December 22, when I took those photos.  I haven't gone there since, not even yesterday, although since it's possible that they prop the doors open while the restaurant is open (unlikely though that seems), I should get back there and find out.

Also on campus, northeast of there, is a golf driving range, which doesn't have a website.  It's near the intersection of Canal Road and Clark Road.  When this is open, it is open to the public (unlike most of the UW's athletic facilities), and that includes its restrooms, whose doors open to the inside.  It was open last summer, much of which I spent near it on the East Campus, although I never actually used those restrooms.  However, it was closed all last winter, which is when I mainly hiked the campus, and this month it's open only four days per week, Thursday through Sunday.  It also keeps approximately business hours.  I have no photos yet.

I've found nothing else on the UW campus.

Laurelhurst Community Center and Playfield

None of the three water fountains in the Playfield were running yesterday.

The restrooms in the Community Center, with doors that open to the outside, each have one toilet, one sink, one dryer, one soap dispenser, and no urinal.  The doors can only be locked through the push buttons in the door knobs; the apparent bolts above those do nothing.  (Yes, I used these.  I hadn't, after all, been near an open restroom I could acceptably enter since lunch.)

The Laurelhurst Community Center's doorway signage hasn't yet changed since last year:

I'd remembered complaining to you, dear Diary, sometime last year, that I could never get from Magnuson Park to University Playground and all the rest of the parks then local to me (including this one, actually closest to where I then slept) in one day, that is, within the restroom open hours.  I can't find that line now, and did find that I'd done exactly that April 24, as reported in "Magnuson Park: Things We've Lost, part I" and "Our Main Characters".  With my cart, that time.  But I didn't remember that then, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself for having finished the day's task early (5:30 P.M.) despite all the digressions.  I'd been wondering if I could finish the four parks of the 60s and 70s as well, thus making the last hike almost a formality, and decided "Yes, I can!"

So I hightailed it north to, um,

SUN Park

The name of this park is an acronym for a twee slogan; that's why it's capitalised.  Last year it was a private park which I used to introduce the two "Ballard Seacoast" pages, but according to the City of Seattle's 2021 Real Property Report (PDF) it's now an official Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park, although it doesn't have any official signage yet.  It fits somewhat awkwardly among the official parks of North Seattle, because it's mostly a demonstration garden, like the Center for Urban Horticulture at the UW (about a mile from this park), or parts of the Woodland Park Rose Garden - one not a Seattle park, the other under private management.  But it does already have one parkish amenity:

Unsheltered benches!  (OK, I'm not sure the log in the middle photo is meant as a bench, but the other two certainly are.)  Maybe officialness will bring others - a trash can?  A water fountain?  Naah, that's way too much to hope for.

Anyway, after that brief break, I really did hurry north to

Bryant Playground

Let me shorten this a bit:  I've still never seen any water fountain at any of these four parks, the only four parks with water fountains in a fairly wide area, produce water, and that includes last night.

View Ridge Playfield

This one's restrooms are unofficially, but for years now, open 24 hours, so I wasn't surprised to find them open.  I was surprised I was able to find where the main water fountain used to be (this photo is at the Google Drive folder):

It was between the restrooms and the water area of the playground.  It was removed, according to one of the mothers I spoke with at the playground last May, when the removal was recent, "to not spread germs".

This, and the rush I was in, distracted me from my usual check of the men's room.  However, I spent a fair amount of time at this park last year between July (when my phone was stolen) and November (when I got UW Wi-Fi for my new phone), getting Wi-Fi by day at the Northeast branch of the Seattle Public Library, using the men's room here, and sleeping at one or the other.  From that, I'm pretty certain this park's men's room has one toilet without a stall door, one urinal with its own stall (not sure about how wide it is), one sink, one dryer, one soap dispenser; the sink doesn't usually splash my clothing and the dryer worked last time I used it.

Anyway, onward I trudged.  One big difference the cart makes is that hills are much easier to take, such as the hill along 30th Ave NE.

Dahl Playfield

The men's room here has a profound privacy problem, and when it's hosed down, the water pools around the sink to several inches' depth.  The rest of the park is a playfield, and I've had to work pretty hard to find anything to like about it.

But that's because I hadn't bothered to look at the playground yet.  There's a genuinely cool stone garden of sorts near it.

Anyone who happens to be around 25th Ave NE and NE 77th St should definitely take a look at it.

The Dahl Playfield men's room, which was still open a few minutes before 7 P.M., has one toilet without a stall door, one urinal, one sink, one soap dispenser, and no dryer.

Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center and Park

The Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center has the same excuse for not informing anyone of anything that the Green Lake and Magnuson ones do - construction - but here, as at Magnuson, they chose otherwise.

However, none of these signs yet address the possibility of re-opening.

All for now, dear Diary.  I think it's probably already too late to go to the remaining three parks, and tomorrow it's supposed to be pouring rain, so we'll see when I can get to those.  Until then, happy days and good nights.