Magnuson Park Today

Dear Diary,

I spent several hours in Magnuson Park today.  This was mostly for upcoming pages, which still need other work, but partly also the beginning of whatever I'll be able to do by way of a final water fountain and restroom hike of North Seattle before most of the former and some of the latter get closed for winter, in other words, the meat-and-potatoes work of door shots and such that so many of your pages, dear Diary, consist of.

So of the four sites I track at the Google Drive folder for Magnuson Park, here's the rundown:

Entrance - Restroom doors closed.  These are only supposed to be open in summer, and I haven't visited Magnuson Park for you during summer, dear Diary, so I suppose this is unsurprising.  However, considering that these restrooms are inside the "Brig", and I found this on a door to the Brig itself today:

it is still beyond me to explain why those doors haven't been open daily from the pandemic's beginning to this very day.  Did someone brightly design them to open into the building as well, so hygiene within requires the outer doors to remain closed?

However, in other news, the water fountain near the playground was running.  This is the first time I've found it running since you began, dear Diary.  Its drain was clogged, probably by sand, so I'm not going to show you the dispiriting photo, but still, this is good news.  (That photo, all those in this page, and more, are, of course, in the Google Drive folder.)  Good news, yes, but there are trade-offs ahead.

Central - The water fountain was also running, not that that's a huge surprise any more.  However, the restrooms were all closed.  I found what's either a second door to the women's room, or a separate women's room from the one I'd known about before, around the corner from the doorways already familiar to me.  There was very little explanation of the closure - only the women's room, as usual, still had the closure sign with four boxes to check, only none were checked.  The door I hadn't noticed before, or else had forgotten before ever telling you about it, dear Diary, had a slightly more informative sign about "emergency repairs":

 

There's worse to come, though.

Beach - The restrooms were as usual - little privacy (as I remembered unhappily when, later on, I needed to use them), no working dryer in the men's room, but the kind of soap the Department of Parks and Recreation was supplying at the start of the pandemic, not the rather worse kind they'd switched to sometime last fall - so only that last was a mild surprise, and a good one.  Outside, the showers were running, though I didn't try to take a photo this time.  However, the water fountain - the attached water fountain, attached to a building with a furnace, which in a better world would run all winter - well, I've recently shown my own ineptitude at diagnosing damage to water fountains, but the spout and the drainpipe are both missing, so the obvious explanation, I think, is metal thievery.

Tower - Nothing meaningful had changed at this closed, closed, closed site.

So for drinking water, visitors to Magnuson Park today had as their best option the central water fountain, but could also brave the playground one; but for a sink, only the beach restrooms were available.  That's also where the only flush toilets were available, but as always, Magnuson Park has plenty of the other kind.

This is the biggest park in North Seattle.  One of the upcoming pages will, I hope, explain how this gigantic park came to this preposterous pass, but that isn't this page's task; this page is just about telling you what I found today.

I hope to start writing those upcoming pages maybe Tuesday, but it'll depend on the utilities where I live; the Wi-Fi was out this morning, and nobody knows what tomorrow's predicted storm might do to the electricity.  Until we meet again, dear Diary, happy days.