While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part I

Dear Diary,

Ooh, it's just like old times!  I went on a long hike today, and now begin to tell you all about it just as if I were always so prompt.

I decided that since I've yet to start anything in "N" - that is, between "NE" and "NW" - it was time to do so.  Especially since I had errands today on N 45th St and N 36th St, to run along the way.

While I've been working on behind the scenes stuff, dear Diary, I've been re-reading you, and it's been frustrating watching myself keep making rules against taking photos.  So I set off on this hike with the attitude that I must visit each park in my target area, and must take at least one photo at each.  I didn't go so far as to consult the 2021 Seattle real property report, which I just found out has already been released to the public, and which provides the most authoritative list of parks in town, though I'll probably do that before my next long hike.  But anyway I meant to go back to all the parks I already knew about.

This page, and part II tonight, are for the parks from the north side of N 50th St to the Ship Canal, in Wallingford, here defined as lying between Stone Way N and 1st Ave NE.  I do think Wallingford reaches further east than that, but it was much easier to assemble the list of parks without having to check each NE address.  As things are, I'll have to write a part III tomorrow, because I forgot one park and one street water fountain that I did know about.  But here are the ones I didn't forget.

First, however, something of an executive summary:  As of today, several weeks after the weather warmed up, no park water fountain between N 50th St and the Ship Canal was running.  The fountain at B. F. Day Playground, the only one running last October, is not running now.  I didn't test every fountain in Woodland Park, which has several trillion of them, but did try half a dozen, including the only two that ran last October, and none of them ran either.

Between this and other reporting, it looks like our mayor really is waging war against water addiction, as I satirically suggested last year, and it might be summer again before bottles of water stop functioning as currency among the homeless.  Or maybe it'll be that way until all lockdowns end, or at least the mayor's office changes hands.

In the meantime, as we're about to see, the map I made the January hikes to check is now actually out of date as to park offerings for hygiene for this area:

- yes, that's right, the map which lied all winter about restrooms being open that weren't is now omitting restrooms that really are open - but, anyway, the map knows of no other places, charities, libraries, whatever, where people can get water in the region I walked today.

EDIT 5/11:  I figured out today how to insert maps from the Open Street Map project, and may have figured out how to edit them, though not, as yet, how to edit them with precision.  The two maps that follow are an overview of the region, and a map of the area covered in this page specifically, but don't take the inserted letters and numbers in the second map as exact guidance.

Meridian Playground

I've told you and shown you quite a lot about this park already, dear Diary, including my first two videos, because I like it a lot.  I summarised all that January 3 in "Hike 1A:  Inconvenients", and hadn't been back until today.  (Though I did reflect on its hugeness for a "playground" January 6 in "What's in a Name?")  Anyway, knowing this was one park I hadn't stinted, I didn't photograph but the bare minimum this time.  The restrooms were open:

The men's room photo is tilted so as to get the sign, but avoid a man who was lying on his sleeping bag under it.

The water fountain remains in an advanced state of decay:

Yes, that's grass visible through what should be the drain.

The shelter remains inhabited, and having recently pointed out that the campers in Woodland Park seem less secure than they were, I should mention something else that I don't think I've shared with you yet, dear Diary:

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation is not accepting reservations for several park shelters, mostly in North Seattle, to wit Gas Works, Ravenna and Woodland Parks, and Meridian Playground.  All but Ravenna Park's shelter were inhabited or in closely related use by homeless people when I surveyed the shelters in my October hikes, and to the best of my recollection also during the January hikes, though those focused less on the shelters.

En route

A block south of the park border on Bagley Ave N stands a "sanican".  It isn't near any visible construction site, so I was curious whether it was a defensive measure put up by neighbours, in which case it would be unlocked, or near a non-visible construction site, in which case it would be locked.  Neither case quite applied:

Not far from there, I found an early work of someone who is obviously a park planner in the making:

Oh, dear, it looks like the sign isn't readable.  It read something like "Please enjoy the dinosaur garden.  Please don't touch."  I was impressed.  Most non-green bits of colour in the photo are toy dinosaurs.

Corliss Place

As previously reported June 8 in "A Shower at Green Lake", this is a traffic triangle.  As previously reported January 6 in "What's in a Name?", it would take a more dedicated park-lover than me to find something nice to say about this park, but anyway here, at long last, is a photo:

Wallingford Playfield

The references for this park are the same, but I've been much less enthusiastic about it, and only started paying my arrears in January.  So I took the same photos as at Meridian Playground, but also the only landscape angle I could find that wasn't full of people:

Unfortunately, the others really are the same photos.  In January, I noticed that the water fountain had been fixed, and allowed myself to hope that there would be park water in Wallingford this year.  Not yet:

At least the restrooms are open:

The Wallingford Steps

I went through Seattle's 2020 real property report more or less line by line last January, and listed everything in North Seattle I thought might prove more or less parklike.  I found seven places particularly interesting:  they're areas owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation, which classifies them as parks.  The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation only classifies two of these as parks in its own list, in other words maintains web pages on those two but not the rest.  The Wallingford Steps and Peace Park are those two, and the Wallingford Steps is the only one of the seven in today's target area.

Three parks in Wallingford and Fremont are organised around big height differentials within them.  This is the most determinedly non-ADA, and the fanciest.  I've previously, June 9 in "At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?", shown you, dear Diary, a picture of these steps' central landing/mosaic, but I haven't tried to show that to you in context, illustrate why the parks department might accept this as a park.  Here's a try:

And that's where this page had better stop, dear Diary, because I have a bunch of photos of the next few parks, and Blogspot gets cranky if I use too many in one page.  Until a little later.