The Seattle Parks' Winter 2019-2020 Restroom Map

Dear Diary,

Have you noticed how the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation was so very reluctant, this past winter, to reveal how many and which restrooms were actually open?  First publishing a summer map as if it were true of winter, then obfuscating what was intended to be a real winter map by pretending that a "sanican" was as good as a restroom.

I have a theory.  I think a wicked enchanter has cursed the entire staff of the parks department.  He will not allow them to publish a winter restroom map until and unless every single one sacrifices that which the person most loves to help bolster the wicked enchanter's spellcasting.

So I've decided to defang the curse by publishing it for them.  Here, I think, is a map something like the map the top people in the department were planning on the basis of, winter before last.  It probably isn't what you're expecting, dear Diary, but we'll get to that.

Wow, isn't that colourful.  Yes, it shows the kinds of park restrooms you've mainly been about, dear Diary, but it also shows other things that in November 2019 any reasonable person would have expected would be open all winter.  The park restrooms sensu stricto are in blue.  The other things the parks department runs - Community Centers, various other kinds of Centers, and Pools - are in green.  I know the Ballard Pool was closed all winter, and several other pools were being renovated, and so on, but I was pressed for time and left everything in.  Similarly with the purple dots, which represent the Seattle Public Library, and the black ones, which represent a half-dozen university libraries that I know to have been open to the public.

(Also because I was pressed for time, I didn't sweat a few blocks and ignored things that confused me.  I have no idea why the parks department would claim a restroom or restrooms at Asa Mercer Middle School, but could come up with no other theory for that line in the list.  I ended up moving Cal Anderson Park several blocks south very late in the process, and undoubtedly, in areas I'm less familiar with, notably southern Seattle in general and West Seattle in particular, missed a bunch of similar mistakes.  But I think the resulting map at least gets across the rough location of everything, and the more exact locations of some things.)

So that's something like the planning map, in my humble opinion.  And until a certain date, that worked out just fine.  But on March 13, 2020, all the university libraries, all the Seattle Public Libraries, all the Pools and Centers - every last one of them closed, and we were left with nothing but the park restrooms.  (And, for about two weeks, a few buildings at the UW; I don't know how those weeks went at other campuses with open buildings.)  We homeless were left with, according to the list published on November 15, 2019, these:

(That map, I made much more carefully, but still could have made mistakes; in particular, the "Asa Mercer" line is in this one too.)

Two weeks later, it was reported that the mayor had claimed a whole lot more park restrooms to be open than actually were.  A few days after that, the same source blasted the mayor's faulty arithmetic, and a few days after that, the mayor ordered that parks restrooms be opened regardless of the fact that the weather was still too cold for all to be opened safely.

I think this series of bad things resulted directly from the curse.  The mayor asked for information about park restrooms that were open and got a summer map, because that's all the curse allows the parks department to produce.  Then she discovered that she'd put her foot in her mouth, and however much she hates the homeless, she probably also hates being embarrassed that way by her subordinates.  So this past winter she handed the job of mapping restrooms to the Department of Human Services, but as your pages have chronicled at length, dear Diary, that department was unable or unwilling to stop the lies coming out of the parks department.

Tomorrow I will probably go hiking again, working out which restrooms and water fountains are available this spring, but someday soon I hope to compare the winter 2021 restroom map for North Seattle that I showed you earlier today, dear Diary, with various obscure lists of restrooms that guided my January hikes, to come to some kind of conclusions concerning which restrooms the department could have opened and should have opened.  These conclusions may or may not differ, as a result of map usage, from those I drew not very long ago in "Park restrooms in North Seattle: Some numbers", but the maps resulting from the comparisons will probably seem a bit fairer to the undoubtedly innocent victims of the enchanter's curse.

Until then, a good night and happy days, dear Diary!

PS May 20:  I want to clarify that I do not consider the idea of mapping publicly available information, as I did in this page, my intellectual property.  I will be delighted if others do better versions of these maps and publish them, even if that makes those others money that they don't share with me.  Please assume that this page is under a Creative Commons Licence that accomplishes that set of things.