Dear Diary,
Well, today was my last hike this month for you. I went to twelve parks. All have water fountains, and six also have restrooms:
- Matthews Beach (both)
- Meadowbrook Playfield (both)
- Victory Heights Playground (fountain)
- Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (both)
- Licton Springs Park (both)
- Northgate Park (fountain)
- Pinehurst Playground (fountain)
- Jackson Park (both)
- Little Brook Park (both)
- Cedar Park (fountain)
- Albert Davis Park (fountain)
- Virgil Flaim Park (fountain)
I also went back to the street fountain on N 45th St.
My object was to complete the Google Drive folder in which I keep the boring door shots and such from the hikes I just finished. I hadn't re-visited the parks from the third region I hiked earlier in May, as I had the parks from the first two, and so didn't have photos of them at Google Drive. That is now fixed, as is my lack of a photo of that street fountain (which still isn't running).
Two major changes among those parks, plus some minor ones I'll cover below. The first major one is that I found the restroom open at Little Brook Park, and the lock placed in such a way that it would not prevent latching the door. I think that's the first time I've seen it like that, and expand on that a bit below. The second major change is that while the water is still running to the water fountain at Virgil Flaim Park, some enterprising person has vandalised the fountain such that it's probably now easier to fill bottles there, but certainly harder to drink from the fountain.
I have nothing to say about some of the parks listed above, so don't say anything about them in this page, except what I just said: there are now photos at Google Drive showing whether the restrooms were open or the water fountains running as of my last visit.
Matthews Beach
As in every one of my visits to date - none of which have taken place in calendrical summer - I found the shower restrooms on the lake side of the restroom building closed. As in most of my visits to date, I also found one of the single-user stalls on the other side boarded up. The remaining single-user stall has one toilet, no urinal, one sink which splashed me when I used it, but not as badly as the south-facing sink at Soundview Playfield, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.
The water fountain was not running.
Meadowbrook Community Center, Playfield and Pool
This is the sign I photographed by night on "Hike 9C", this time by day so it can be read:
The mural is signed "Miller" as is another adjacent; I don't know more.
The people staffing the pool as a shower and restroom provider have been busily posting updates:
unlike most of the Community Centers, including this one, although this one has at least taken down its sign saying it would close for the inauguration:
Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms were open, as expected (even the hopelessly outdated - well, hmmm, some things on the map offered by the Seattle Department of Human Services that I hiked last January to check, some things have been updated, for example Meridian Playground's restrooms are now mapped as open, other things haven't, such as the U-District location of the Urban Rest Stop still shown as open - but anyway, my point was, that until today that map was very out of date, but even it showed Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms as having re-opened).
Um, yeah, so the Meadowbrook Playfield men's room has two toilets with stall doors, one urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.
I found all three of Meadowbrook Playfield's water fountains this time, exactly where I'd found them before. Two ran in October, but none are running now.
Maple Leaf Reservoir Park
The restrooms were open, and there was even an employee of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation there cleaning them. When I update the maps tomorrow, I'll change this park's restrooms to half red, half blue.
Licton Springs Park
Unlike most of the restrooms closed in Ballard and southern "NE", but like University Playground and Little Brook, this park's restrooms have no sign on their doors announcing why they're closed. The men's room's stuff is mostly around a bend from the door, but I could see most of the women's room - the stalls have doors, in both rooms, but one of the women's stall doors had swung open - and I saw no damage. I've heard there's damage at University Playground but not heard a convincing explanation why that was the only restroom damage not fixed last year in North Seattle, and I've also heard a completely different reason for why those restrooms haven't opened. I figure without even a half-assed sign like those at Ravenna Park's "upper" restrooms, there's no reason I should assume a park restroom is closed because it has to be.
Anyway. Licton Springs's water fountains are still running.
Northgate Community Center and Park
After I visited this park as part of the third region, I complained vigourously about the way the people working for Curative Inc at a COVID testing site at the south end of the park had blocked off large parts of it. Whether because someone at the city actually read that page (something I haven't seen signs of in months), or because someone else complained effectively, or maybe because there's an actual considerate human being among Curative's local employees, their tape is now much more carefully placed. In particular, although it runs for some distance alongside the playground and the Community Center's front, it leaves paved paths into both areas open. I was in a hurry, however - this was only the hike's halfway point - and took only a water fountain photo (still not running), and no photos of the tape or the Center's front, at which I didn't even look. Sorry, dear Diary.
Pinehurst Playground
As my photo shows, the water fountain here is running rather low. I had decided to try the water of parks whose water I hadn't tried yet, so I drained the second bottle I was carrying, but it was so hard to fill a bottle (it only got halfway, actually) that I gave up on filling two.
Jackson Park
I owe an apology to the Jackson Park café, which I failed miserably to describe on the basis of vague, hurried impressions on my first visit earlier this month. (All my previous visits to this park had been too early in the morning or too late in the evening for the place to be open.) I basically conveyed my surprise that it isn't what one normally thinks of as a "café". Well, duh, because even though they call it that at Jackson Park, it's actually much more like a bar and grill, or at least a rather unpretentious restaurant. It does have a few pastries, and while they're definitely not Little Debbie, they also aren't the hand-crafted wonders most actual cafés take pride in. I got a grilled cheese sandwich to go, trying to make up for many uses of their driving range men's room, and it was pretty good blocks later.
That men's room is a single-user stall with one toilet, no urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser. Jackson Park is almost entirely devoted to a sport, so this is a fair test, and I did not see yellow spots on the toilet seat. Score one against my argument that it's a bad idea to eliminate urinals from park restrooms.
I also looked carefully at the buildings, and Open Street Map hasn't left out a building, but it may have misplaced it. Again, the map:
The building on the upper left could be the building by the driving range, but it can't be, because it doesn't really face the driving range, which is that big lighter green area on the top left. It also isn't anywhere near wide enough. I'm not sure I can learn enough to fix things like this in Open Street Map, but it needs fixed. Anyway, though, I thought that was a building between the wide lower building and the unmapped driving range building, but there is no third building in that sequence; what I described as a "workshop" was actually a conflation in my memory of "employees only" doors in both buildings, the second of which (the one behind the part of the driving range building I'm familiar with) is rather workshoppish.
Little Brook Park
As noted above, I found the restroom not only open, but for the first time opened in such a way that the lock that closes it at night doesn't also keep users from latching it by day.
I don't know how much of this to attribute to the presence of a parks department employee, whose job it is to provide fun for people in neighbourhoods. Someone, probably him, had set up a stereo providing music, and a portable basketball hoop, at which he was trying to teach a couple of teenagers some moves. The parks department slogan is, I think, "Neighborhood Rec'n"; at least that's what's on their trucks. However, a quick Google search on that turned up 0 results, so I just don't know.
Anyway, my point is, I don't know whether Little Brook's restroom has actually opened for the season or not, let alone whether its door will be reliably carefully arranged in future.
It has one toilet with no meaningful door, no urinal, one sink, one dryer, and a spot where someone had stolen one soap dispenser.
Cedar Park
Awkwardly, I found myself following a family that includes a teenaged girl for about half a dozen blocks on the way to this park.
It has a water fountain that ran last October, but isn't running now.
Albert Davis Park
This park was officially closed for one week after its May 6 sweep. Supposedly that closure was to enable parks department employees to start restoring the park from the damage done by an encampment that was there for more than a year. The parks department web page says nothing now about a closure, so presumably it hasn't been extended.
I visited this park twice during the closure, in prime daylight hours, and saw neither department employees nor their trucks. Now it turns out they didn't even bother to show up to take down their closure materials. For shame!
Virgil Flaim Park
As I walked to this park, a visibly homeless man saw the bottle in one of my satchel pockets and asked if I had any water to spare. I didn't - for one thing, I've been drinking from that bottle for months, and for another, there were only a few sips in it - but I assured him that the water fountain in Virgil Flaim Park, just a block away, was running. I had walked too far to hear his reply.
This park had the only outdoor water fountain known to me running in Lake City. (I visited the Fred Meyer in the area today, and it may have a water fountain that's running, but I didn't find one. The Lake City branch of the Seattle Public Library, and the Lake City Community Center, are both open limited hours.) It's still running, but no longer drinkable from.
Some clever and immoral person, probably a resident of one of the neighbouring RVs, has extracted the pipe that delivers water to the spigot, and routed it so it instead delivers water toward the ground. I think it's probably turnable enough to be a great bottle-filler, but can't be made a useable drinking spout. I was too disgusted - this really is the kind of vandalism homeless people are endlessly accused of, plain as day really our fault this time - to experiment, and far too disgusted to try to fill my own bottle as I'd planned.
[EDIT 6/11 - All wrong. I went back June 8, and found that the water actually comes not from this detached pipe, but from a hole in the side of another pipe, which makes it useless for filling bottles as well as for drinking directly. I'm pretty sure this was sabotage rather than metal theft, and the main victims are probably the nearby homeless, so the saboteur was probably someone housed who objects to the existence of homeless people. I apologise for blaming the victims.]
And from there, or anyway a few blocks from there, I caught a bus away, got a picture of the still not running N 45th St water fountain, and went on.
I still have one project to do, which I hope to accomplish next week, but we'll see. At any rate, I hope not to hike for you next month, dear Diary. Tomorrow, I should be able to update the spreadsheet in the Google Drive folder, and also show you final May maps of open and closed restrooms and running and otherwise water fountains. Until then good night.
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