Magnuson Park Restrooms: A Relative Chronology, part II

Dear Diary,

Last night I told you about four locations in which Warren G. Magnuson Park, formerly Sand Point Park, has had restrooms with, so I presume but do not know, doors that open to the outside.  I also told you that I think there've been nine such locations.  It follows that there are five left for today.  I also told you I was using four maps, two of which were the ones you, dear Diary, have been familiar with since your early days.  Neither of those were among the maps I showed you yesterday; it follows that both of today's maps are familiar ones.

Map #3, not yet dated

This map is distinctive in two ways:  It shows Magnuson Park with far more restrooms at once than any other map I've found, almost enough for the giant park - and it's the least discernibly official map.  It doesn't have a Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation logo on it, and I've only found it in the form of a copy taped to the half of the beach restroom building that isn't open to the public.  And on my most recent visit, last Saturday, that copy had finally been torn down, whether by a parks employee or by a thief:

So I have to work from the photos I already showed you, dear Diary, which split the map into two:

So the thing is, this map could originally have been meant to present a vision for the park's future, a vision in which restrooms figure more prominently than in most such I've seen.  It doesn't present anything obviously speculative, and of the seven restroom buildings it shows, three are confirmed by the maps I've already shown you, dear Diary, while two more are confirmed because they're still standing today.  So the issue of this map's trustworthiness boils down, for my purposes, to two buildings.

Anyway, let's look at the restrooms this map depicts.

This is the final appearance of the boat launch restrooms and the park entrance restrooms.  Of the older restroom locations in Magnuson Park, only the beach still has a set, and they aren't the set present whenever this map was made.

Here are the two locations whose restroom buildings still stand:

The Central Restrooms

The parks department calls this pair the "sport" restrooms, but we'll see that this map presents, and other evidence supports, another sport-area pair.  These could be called the "tennis court" restrooms, I suppose, but they're also close to the wetlands, and various other places.  I think it's easiest just to call them central.

This set are seasonal, closing each long winter.  The parks department closes seasonal restrooms for two main reasons.  Some are simply not equal to the weather's demands.  This isn't a bright line - it depends on the weather - but I have a list of restrooms that usually fall on the wrong side of the blurry line, and these aren't on it.  The other reason the parks department closes seasonal restrooms is "historic low usage".  Basically, closing restrooms few people use enables parks maintenance people to spend time on other things in winter, most notably removing graffiti.  Much of my anger last winter was focused on the idiocy of closing restrooms based on "historic low usage" when we were in the middle of a period of historically high usage of park restrooms, but that's more or less water under the bridge now, with all libraries back open, and maybe, somewhere, a community center or two, and ...  More on this in the next supporting page before I get to thrown away amenities as a central topic.

Anyhow, my point is, that these restrooms set into a hill are not closed because they were poorly constructed, but because of parks department manpower allocation, and, doubtless the case with their being closed so early this year, because of vandalism.

The first parks department employee I talked with at length, on my first visit to Northacres Park, had quite a lot to say about vandalism.  I've expressed some scepticism about some cases of vandalism, primarily with regard to water fountains, but I very much doubt he was lying to me in talking about maltreatment of restrooms.  He itemised specific problems that were keeping Cowen Park's and University Playground's restrooms closed (although another parks employee I talked with later gave a very different reason for the latter).

And he really focused on Magnuson Park.  Now this guy has a different take on vandalism from mine.  He joked about the death penalty for taggers; in his view, graffiti can make a restroom unuseable.  But he also told me that he had personally dealt with the aftermath when someone or ones exploded a rabbit in the beach women's room at Magnuson Park, and we'll get back to this topic below.  I don't know why the central restrooms at Magnuson Park are closed, a month before they'd be closed anyway; vandalism is just an easy guess.  But it's quite another story with the next set.

The "Tower" Restrooms

A page in which the parks department talks about future work at Magnuson Park, apparently meant to include resurrecting either the park entrance restrooms or a pair described below, includes a very helpful sentence about this restroom building:  It used to be the Navy's Building 315, and the fire that ruined but did not destroy it was in 2016.  As a result, it's on the last map below, which was made in 2012.

That fire is consistently called "arson", but I've never heard that it was intended for pecuniary gain, or the work of a firebug; what I've heard is more consistent with the work of vandals.

It's a very weirdly built building to be turned into public restrooms, and I think the reason that was done is pretty obvious:  It was handy to the site of the enlisted men's bathhouse, just across the road, so when the parks department gave up on that building, they used this one as a substitute.

I want you to take special note of that, dear Diary:  At one time, the parks department thought it important to replace restroom buildings.  It would be easy to speculate that that 2016 fire was decisive in changing their approach, but in the coming pages we'll see that that isn't so.

Anyway, those are the two buildings still standing.  What of the two that Brian Judd, Magnuson Park's manager, in talking with me, dismissed as fairy tales?

?? The Promontory Point Restrooms

It might be truer to say that these were the parking lot restrooms, or to call them southeastern, but as long as I'm trying to glamourise these pedestrian demolished buildings, I might as well go whole hog.

Of the seven restroom locations shown on map #3, this is the least documented.  All I can go by is that at the place shown on the map, without a "sanican" on top (it's a stone's throw away instead), there's a similar patch of ground to those where the boat launch restrooms used to be, and where the next ones were.  Which isn't much; I'm sure ground can be stunted in other ways.

If these restrooms existed, they may be the easiest to explain the demolition of; they're pretty much in, not just close to, the federally protected wetlands.

Here's the ground I'm talking about:

? The Field Restrooms

Another sign of the untrustworthiness of map #3 is that it contradicts itself as to where these restrooms were.  It shows them facing the southern wing of building 224, which is obviously the building now Santos Place.  But it also shows them well north of home plate on the adjacent baseball field.  Um, these are not the same places.

The problem for people who'd deny that I should trust map #3 at all is that there was definitely plumbing in this remote location.

See, when I wrote your page, dear Diary, titled "Two Magnuson Park Questions Tentatively Answered", the two questions were:  1) Are there any hand-washing stations in Magnuson Park, where half the parks department's "sanican"s in North Seattle are?  And 2) had I already found all the water fountains there?  I answered these questions, in that page, "No", and "Yes".

But as to question 2, I was wrong.  Look:

See that pipe sticking up, there?  That used to be a water fountain.  And it isn't north of home plate.

Going north about as far as I think makes sense gets us this:

But going south of the fountain - completely ignoring the map as regards home plate, but obeying it as regards Santos Place - we get some familiar stunted land:

I'm pretty convinced by the southern location, and although I certainly don't think I've proven my case, I do retract my claim that these restrooms must have been obliterated by the building of Sports Field Drive.  But I also think they came down because the water to this location probably was cut off by that construction, and we know from the Green Lake Community Center last winter that keeping restrooms open without water is asking for trouble.

Map #4, 2012

This is the map writ large near the 74th St entrance to the park, much nearer, in fact, than the site whose restrooms I call the "park entrance" restrooms.  Here's another photo of it:

The reason I date it to 2012 is that a map very like it is in the 2012 "Strategic Development Plan" for Magnuson Park.  Oh, the two versions may differ by a year or three, but they're similar in essentials.

For one thing, unlike the earlier maps, these show "sanican"s all over the park.  One of the comments in the final version of the 1974-1976 environmental impact statement deplored the parks department's intention to use "chemical toilets" for any length of time, strongly preferring real restrooms.  That comment came from a community group.  How times change.

Also, both show only three restroom locations:  central, beach, and tower.  Boat launch, Promontory point, field, and park entrance restrooms are all gone.

Anyone keeping track might justifiably feel confused by now.  I told you, dear Diary, that I thought at least nine buildings in Magnuson Park had contained public restrooms whose doors opened to the outside.  In saying that, I'm actually taking things for granted - after all, I don't even know that the tower restrooms' doors opened to the outside, and I certainly don't know that there was, for example, more than one restroom at the boat launch.  But anyway, so far, I've only told you about eight of those buildings, and here I am out of maps.

The Brig

It would seem that existing outside doors to restrooms within the Brig either were built after 2012, or have never been taken all that seriously by the parks department, as witness the failure to open them when most of the buildings in the park, which had offered their visitors restrooms, had closed.

I don't actually know that there are restrooms behind those doors, never having seen them for myself, but people I've spoken with at the Brig's entrances have told me they're restrooms, and so does the parks department itself.

And a good thing too.  The Magnuson Community Center is undergoing renovation, and its temporary home is in the Brig.  Yet this is what I found on the building's door Saturday:

You'd think we were still in spring 2020.

All for tonight, dear Diary.  Sometime soon I hope to tell you about another focal area of park restroom closure and demolition, one outside North Seattle, but I have more hiking, and more of my own life away from you, dear Diary, to do before that happens.  Good night and good days until then.