Meridian Playground Today

Dear Diary,

Yeah, I know, I told you I was done with these, but today I felt very lazy, finally convinced myself in late afternoon to go to my far-away bank for laundry quarters, and on the way back, even though I'd left my newspaper at home, I finally gave in to my curiosity:  if Gas Works Park had been swept, had Meridian Playground?

Also, I forgot to tell you, dear Diary, but I found Gas Works's water fountain running Wednesday night, the first time I've found that one running since your first page.  (Photos at Google Drive:  Meridian, Gas Works.)  So I was curious whether repair work on Meridian Playground's much more obviously damaged fountain had begun.

It has:

But:

By the standards of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, or at least its northeast maintenance team, winter has come.  So, predictably:

However, Meridian Playground has not been effectively swept.  And, well.  Meridian Playground is the former grounds of a residential school for girls (i.e., a place to throw them away).  The school building is now home to a bunch of non-profits, like other buildings such as University Heights.  However, unlike U-Heights, Good Shepherd Center is actually city-owned.  And see, dear Diary if you can figure out what's missing from this photo of their front door:

Yes, that's right, they've forgotten to put their "No Public Restrooms" sign back up!  So I'm not sure how badly off the homeless of Meridian Playground actually are tonight.

Anyway, I've been spending my lazy hours doing something I should've done months ago, building a spreadsheet of parks.  We'll see whether I finish hiking the set of downtown parks now known to me this rainy weekend, or punt and finish the spreadsheet instead, so as to go on longer hikes, to more parks, next weekend when (anything's possible) it might rain a little less.

Until whenever, then, dear Diary, good night and good days.

All Night Long, Holiday Edition

Dear Diary,

Happy Thanksgiving!

Last night I was itching to go hiking, and the weather forecasters were claiming that there wouldn't be that much rain.  Also, Boeing Field has started to record temperatures of 32° F, but only just barely.  So I thought of parks whose restrooms seemed likely to be open 24 hours and which I hadn't yet visited in that capacity, and got started.

And there's something to be thankful for!  The restrooms were indeed open at all three parks I visited - Bitter Lake Playfield (where they'll probably be closed soon, though not because of the temperature), Gas Works Park (where they should stay open all winter), and one to be named soon (that link to the Google Drive folder with the photos won't work until then; those restrooms not only close each winter, but have to).

On a less delightful note, I found the shelter at Gas Works Park empty for only the second time since I first found it, probably not too long after 2014.  Maybe it was swept in mid-September.  Unfortunately, that huge, dry shelter is right next to the playground, which makes its semi-permanent occupation more problematic.  I was surprised, of course, to find the shelter empty, whether or not it had been swept, and wondered whether the campers - who all had tents, even though they didn't really need them there - had moved to other parts of the park; but I hiked around for a while without finding a single tent.  Anyway, I was too disheartened by that, and by the realisation that I actually lacked the strength to end the night by walking Woodland and Green Lake Parks, to take any photos of the newly revealed shelter.

Still, this is not a story of the parks working normally.  It is commonly claimed that Seattle has only six 24-hour public restrooms.  I've encountered this meme being attributed to at least two sources; one isn't online, but the other, Review of Navigation Team:  2018 Quarter 2 Report (PDF), by David G. Jones, City Auditor, has all the bits of the meme familiar to me on the report's pages 21 and 22, and on page 23 lists the alleged six.  I can't help thinking Jones must not have looked very hard.  His list turns out to be four "sanican"s, and the "wading pool" and "65th St" restrooms at Green Lake Park.  But "sanican"s were far more numerous in the parks than that already in 2018.  Perhaps he was misled by the parks' official hours; it's true that Green Lake is one of the few parks officially open 24 hours, but I don't think the average person experiencing late-night need is going to care, and at least I have never been challenged for late-night visits to parks.  Perhaps he never encountered the park workers' gossip through which I first heard that View Ridge Playfield's restrooms have been 24 hours for "many years".  And maybe park workers used to be much more on the ball, and got the restrooms locked diligently at out-of-the-way places like Bitter Lake Playfield and Carkeek Park.  But in any event, last night, there were probably four pairs of restrooms open at Woodland and Green Lake Parks, and four more open north (Bitter Lake), south (Gas Works), east (View Ridge) and west (Carkeek) of those.  Not even counting the "Portland Loo" at Ballard Commons, which also existed in 2018.  That's eight, or maybe nine, sites just in about a third of the city.  Some - Woodland, perhaps Bitter Lake - are likely to start closing once the famous homeless encampments there are swept, and Gas Works was opened specifically in response to the pandemic.  And Bitter Lake is needlessly seasonal (which, from its geographical position, it oughtn't be).  But nothing requires the city to go back to its old ways of doing things, and even those included more 24-hour real restrooms, to say nothing of the thousands of "sanican"s, than Jones found.

So, being as generous to Jones as I can manage, let's give thanks that in this regard, at least, things have changed for the better, and let's resolve to try hard to keep them changed.  Park restrooms are too inconvenient to be a real solution, but if we can't even keep what we've got now, we'll never get the restrooms we really need.  Thanks!

Speaking of the restrooms we really need, I expect to finish surveying the downtown parks this long weekend.  Until then, dear Diary, a happy holiday, and happy days.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VB: Northwest (northern group)

Dear Diary,

Well, I've had to stay up too late to do it, but here's this page, right on schedule.  So let's get started.  I said that the parks of northwestern downtown in Seattle fell into two groups, because they're different kinds of parks in different environments, because tonight's group are much larger and more photogenic, and because they have different common elements.

Well, tonight's parks' common element is actually the first thing listed, which is arguably not exactly a park at all:  the Elliott Bay Trail.

The parks of downtown Seattle's north waterfront have something else in common, to varying extents.  They're hemmed in by an actual, operating railroad line.  (I was stopped by an 81-car train today, in fact.)  So they're seriously deficient in exits.

The Elliott Bay Trail

The Elliott Bay Trail is a sort of virtual trail kind of like the Cheshiahud Loop, as opposed to a purpose-built trail like the Burke-Gilman Trail (both those comparanda, of course, existing in North Seattle, unlike the Elliott Bay Trail).  The bay it's named after, Elliott Bay, is defined as stretching between Magnolia and West Seattle; which means Seattle's downtown waterfront is entirely on Elliott Bay, not on Puget Sound proper.  The trail is reputed to run from the stadium which is called Lumen Field for however many weeks it is until the next re-branding, north along the downtown waterfront, and then through a series of parks described in this page and in a future page, to the Magnolia Bridge, then further north, away from the shore, to Halladay St, where it crosses from 20th Ave W, which is about as far as the eastern coast of the bay gets, to 21st Ave W, which is about as far as the northwestern coast gets.  It then goes south, with few glimpses of the water, to Smith Cove Park.

It's definitely an actual trail, reasonably well marked, from Alaskan Way and Broad St north and then south to Smith Cove Park, and I've walked all of that.  However, I haven't noticed what becomes of the trail south of Broad St.  If it's basically a lane of Alaskan Way, well, I've walked Alaskan Way from Spring St to Broad St; but if it's somewhere else, I don't know where.

In these pages about the downtown parks from Dearborn to Mercer, and the waterfront to I-5, the Seattle Department of Transportation park that is at least some of that southern part of the Elliott Bay Trail should appear.  I'm already planning a clean-up page for parks I've ignored, and that should go there.  But here I'm just noting that from Broad St to the Magnolia Bridge the trail goes through four substantially more parklike parks.  Two are entirely south of Mercer, one partly; those I'll tell you about, dear Diary, in this page.  The one that's partly south of Mercer is definitely appearing in a future page, and there I'll tell you about the fourth park too, Smith Cove Park, and the rest of the trail in that direction.

The Elliott Bay Trail from Broad St to the Magnolia Bridge is usually physically divided, with a trail to the west (toward the shore) for pedestrians, and one to the east (toward the land) for cyclists.  The pedestrians' trail is considerably longer, because it more or less follows the shore.  On the other hand, it's actually higher up, despite being closer to the shore, so it's better drained, and of course it has much better views, by most standards.

Alaskan Way Boulevard

I've only seen this name for the part of the trail from Broad St to Bay St used in two places:  the Seattle Art Museum's website and Seattle's 2020 Real Property Report.  The name "Boulevard" is kind of a property report joke:  a boulevard is normally a street with islands in it, those islands planted, usually in grass and/or trees.  In this case, the two sides of the "street" are the pedestrian trail and the bike trail.  But the islands in between are certainly planted islands:

The part of the Elliott Bay Trail called, by few people, Alaskan Way Boulevard, is controlled by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, not by SDOT.  It has as amenities benches and stairways between the trails:

Perhaps, dear Diary, you've noticed a sculpture in the fountain in the top photo.  That's there because, for the past fourteen years, Alaskan Way Boulevard has been leased by the Seattle Art Museum as part of a sculpture park which I'll introduce to you further down this page.  I'm not at all clear on whether the benches were SAM's work (though their style in the park is usually quite different), but they definitely do take credit for the plantings.

Alaskan Way Boulevard can be exited to the north and south, and also to the east, through the rest of the sculpture park, which includes a bridge over the railroad tracks.

Myrtle Edwards Park

Myrtle Edwards Park, which goes from Bay St to about halfway between W Thomas St and W John St, is by far the most relaxed of these parks.  Instead of SAM's studiously planned plantings, it's got grass, man:

(Speaking of grass, Wikipedia says it hosts Hempfest, too.)

It hasn't allowed its neighbour to the south to intimidate it from hosting art:

(That's the most accessible-from-pavement part of a much larger installation.  It's become clear to me, dear Diary, that in order to meet my usual standards, I'll have to do another kind of catch-up page at the end of this series, to credit all the artists.  It's just that the downtown parks caught me by surprise with so much art - in many cases a park can't be photographed at all without including some of the art.  Ah well.  Anyway, although in this case I actually did look for the artist's name, because I chose this from at least three works in this park just as I've chosen other art I like to show you in North Seattle parks, I'd rather credit them all at once in that catch-up page.)

Unlike the parks to its north and south, Myrtle Edwards Park has several shoreline accesses, with the kind of gritty sand one doesn't want to walk on in sandals.  I regret to inform you, dear Diary, that the most picturesque of these is in fact the one the Seattle Art Museum pretentiously takes credit for, in a sign I didn't photograph:

Myrtle Edwards Park can be exited to the north, to the south, or via a bridge that is entirely without stairs, and whose other end is on 3rd Ave W between W Thomas St and W Harrison St.  A bit of that very long bridge is visible in the top photo above.  Wikipedia confirms what a cornerstone told me, that this bridge opened in 2012.  Hempfest must have been something of a drag to get to before that.  Myrtle Edwards Park wasn't city land before 1968, and was definitely open by 1976, but I don't know when in that span it did open.

(Seattle Art Museum) Olympic Sculpture Park

OK, dear Diary, how shall I describe museums to you?

They're earnestly pretentious:

They're academic, informed and informative:

(And to be fair, there are three more of the first type of sign in the park, and several dozen more of the second.  Museums can get away with their pretensions because they're earnest about them, but mainly because they provide great value of information per minor bit of puffery.)

They're bossy:

There are so many "don't touch" signs scattered around the park, most people I saw were scared to walk on the grass, too.  Oh yes - for all their pomposity about their plantings, SAM used grass as well:

Anyway, as to bossiness.  For some reason SAM thought people in a park would want the kind of seating they might get in a lecture hall:

And then they put into this park, out of 20 sculptures listed in their Map and Guide (PDF), no fewer than four that are more or less furniture suitable for sitting on.  (Mary's Invitation by Ginny Ruffner, Untitled by Roy McMakin, Eye Benches by Louise Bourgeois, and Love & Loss by McMakin.)  Unsurprisingly, I found each of these being touched, more precisely being used as a seat, by people I didn't know, during my visit to this park today.  Basically, this cluelessness about park furniture is why I don't think SAM put up the benches along Alaskan Way Boulevard.

The park does offer several neat and unusual things, of very different kinds.  Triple trash:

On a loftier plane, a small amphitheatre:

And a grove which, like the amphitheatre, appears to be devoid of sculpture.  (In fairness, this grove has the best-preserved of the four signs about areas, the one I showed you above as an example of pretension, dear Diary.)

I went there today with the goal of not photographing any of the works of art.  Turned out I didn't much like most of them (Beverly Pepper's Persephone Unbound was the only one to win immediate assent from me, of the 17 I actually saw), but even before I knew that, I wanted to focus on this park as a park, not as a site for artworks.  And as a park, it has pluses and minuses:  silly furniture, mostly gravel paths, but triple trash, a lot of interesting plants, and a few places which were obviously created for the joy of parks rather than for the joy of art.

Olympic Sculpture Park, which runs from Broad St to Bay St and from, ahem, Western Ave to the waterfront, and opened in 2007, is only partly a waterfront park, although most of those chairs are so placed that people can watch the western sky over the water.  It also has bridges over both the railroad and Elliott Ave, the former bridge incorporating Teresita Fernández's Seattle Cloud Cover.  So it has quite a few exits, perhaps its biggest advantage, as a park, over Myrtle Edwards Park and this next one.

(Port of Seattle) Centennial Park

Seattle Center, to come in the next page of this series, at 74 acres, is much larger than Centennial Park, but Seattle Center is by no stretch of the imagination really a park.  So Centennial Park is secure as the largest park (partly) in downtown Seattle, at eleven acres, at least until the plans for Waterfront Park move a great deal further along.  However, all of Olympic Sculpture Park, nine acres, is in downtown Seattle, and not all of Centennial Park is, in the sense that much of it, probably more than half, is actually north of the line of W Mercer St.

Don Sherwood's history file (PDF) says the Port was unenthusiastic about a park getting in the way of its planned and then built grain terminal at pier 86, but the then-Port Commissioners - that group two members of which lost re-election not long ago - liked the idea a lot better.  At any rate, in 1976 the city's Elliott Bay Park was renamed Myrtle Edwards Park (evidence that it existed earlier), and probably not coincidentally, the port's Elliott Bay Park opened.  In 2011 it was renamed Centennial Park in honour of the port's centennial.  Google Maps is simply wrong these days when it claims that Elliott Bay Park still exists somewhere along this waterfront.

Centennial Park is a much less relaxing park than Myrtle Edwards.  It's as if, stuck with the job of building a park, the port's people decided to pull out all the stops. Every twenty feet or so along the Elliott Bay Trail - ok, maybe every hundred feet - there's something new, and the two paths converge enough that both pedestrians and cyclists can approach it.  Also, all sorts of things are named after upper managers of the port in the third quarter or so of the 20th century.  (The park itself is dedicated to the memory of, but never named after, Howard M. Burke, port head 1953-1964.)

As I said, I think more than half the park's area, so more than half of its stuff, is north of the line of W Mercer St.  (Also, that's where the grain terminal, which became the park's focal point, is.)  Its exit to the east is north of there too.  But I think two things worth showing you, dear Diary, are further south.  First, a harbour light.  I first visited these parks at night, twice, but don't remember whether it was lit.

Second, a rose garden.  I liked the topiary-like tree at its north end even in the dark; it took me longer to notice that a few of the plants were still blooming in late November (these photos are from my first daytime visit, yesterday), and I don't know whether my phone's camera actually noticed the flowers itself.

Still, roses in November!  On which hopeful note, dear Diary, I must take your leave for a while.  I hope to write my review of Lezlie Lowe's No Place to Go this week, and then hope to finish this particular series of pages - park appreciations of the downtown parks - over the long weekend.  But we'll see.  Happy days and nights, then, until we meet again.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VA: Northwest (southern group)

Dear Diary,

I decided to split the northwest group of parks in two.  First of all because the parks in each half are linked by different things, and second because these parks are significantly smaller and less appreciable, in this series devoted to park appreciation, than the parks in the second page, so I wanted that second page not to have to include this page's photos along with its own, and thus run up against a Blogspot limit.

This page's parks are linked by being associated with the part of Seattle's waterfront that is seen as a recreational destination by tourists, local people who want to spend money, and so on:  they're near Pike Place Market, the Great Wheel, and many other businesses.  Several are also linked by being located on nearly consecutive piers - wooden constructions out over the water, which, dear Diary, along Seattle's broadly downtownish waterfront, are numbered.  (HistoryLink has a much more detailed account, though not maps like the first site linked.)

There are several barriers between this part of downtown and the rest.  It is, being the waterfront, physically lower than most of downtown, so it's downhill to get there and uphill to leave, just like the street ends throughout Seattle and Seaview Ave, Golden Gardens Park, and so on in North Seattle.  Also, Alaskan Way is a very wide street, along which lots of people drive, and one has to cross it to get from downtown in general to most of these parks.  I think the railroads no longer traverse the parts of their tracks that also lie between most of downtown and the shore, but, well, I've been wrong about railroads before.

But since there's a lot of money involved in offering Seattle's people and tourists a taste of this part of the waterfront, there are also lots of efforts to solve these problems, minimise these barriers.  Starting with the smallest and, therefore, first of the parks in this page.

Pike Street Hillclimb

The Pike Street Hillclimb is, like the Wallingford Steps, a series of stairways designated as a park by the Seattle Department of Transportation.  I'm inclined to agree with the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation that SDOT is smoking something with regard to this one; the Pike Street Hillclimb has none of the greenery and none of the art that make the Wallingford Steps (also owned by SDOT) an exceptionally nice way to go up and down, a minor destination in its own right, and worthy of a page in its honour at the parks department website.  (In other words, dear Diary, the Pike Street Hillclimb does not have, nor deserve, such a page.)

It does, on the other hand, bridge all the barriers between upper Pike St and the one block of lower Pike St that ends with an actual traffic light enabling crossing Alaskan Way.  (If one crosses that light, one finds oneself at Pier 59.)  It is, therefore, very popular, in the limited sense that lots of people use it; and since those people are pedestrians, I guess I'm not surprised that SDOT, whose usual concern is with drivers, thinks of it as parkish.  I traversed all of it on the Saturday night of October 30, when Halloween was being celebrated a day early, but since it didn't have any plumbing, had no interest in taking photos.  When I came back on Saturday, November 6 to photograph these parks by day, I'd approached from the south instead, and I had so much trouble photographing the lowest staircase without highlighting a bunch of people that I didn't bother to visit any higher part of it.

Victor Steinbrueck Park

This is the least waterfronty park in this page; it runs for about half a block along the west side of Western Ave, north and south of Virginia St.  I included it here, while excluding some Belltown parks equally near the waterfront further north, partly because Victor Steinbrueck Park has, and is indeed dominated by, views of the water, which those don't and aren't, and partly because it's right next to Pike Place Market, just north of it.  It's nearly as far north as piers 64 and 65 used to be.  It opened in 1970, but wasn't named after Victor Steinbrueck (a leader of the fight to preserve Pike Place Market) until he died in 1985.

This is the only park in this page with which I have a history, and that history is that this park taught me to fear the homeless of Seattle's downtown.  The temporary agency branch from which I got most of my work from 2006 to 2010 was located across the street from it, so when I went there to pick up my paychecks, I often wandered nearby.  There was often someone having what is nowadays delicately called "a mental health crisis" while I was there - not always, but, say, half the time?  There were usually the kinds of crusty old homeless men I've usually avoided ever since, even as recently as a year ago when I was halfway to becoming an old homeless man myself.  There were sometimes disturbingly forward, and visibly mentally ill, homeless women.  It was very much not my scene, even though I'd previously been homeless for a few months of 2003 in Madison, Wisconsin, and was from 2006 to 2012 living in an SRO, as I had previously 1997-1998 and 2004-2006.  (Many people who consider themselves allies of the homeless are horrified by SROs, seeing them as a form of homelessness.  This kind of squeamishness is something I, as a homeless man, could've done without in allies.  Just as the homeless of Victor Steinbrueck Park could probably do without my advocacy.)  I mentioned in my description of Freeway Park that I feared its homeless less than most downtown homeless, and mentioned then that another park was coming where I had the opposite reaction.  This is that park.

So I'm pretty surprised I could put away my fears enough to take three photos to show appreciation of this park that I don't really feel.  (It may help that it was, after all, a decade later, and some of the stuff that attracted the homeless in those years is now gone, so some of the scary people are too.)  Victor Steinbrueck Park is basically a big grassy mound surrounded by stone berms that serve as the benches on which many of the people just described might sit, as also might, of course, people I felt I had more in common with fifteen years ago.  Grass is in short supply in the parks of downtown Seattle - Kobe Terrace, Freeway Park, City Hall Park as was, and we'll get to a few more - so it has that going for it.  And, of course, being a downtown park, it has some art:

Piers 62 and 63

This is basically a big not quite empty wooden plaza right now, having opened fairly recently; it's opposite the end of Pine St.  The parks department web page, referring only to Pier 62 (I think Pier 63 is not yet built, maybe cancelled), calls it a "preview" of "the full Waterfront Park".  I just spent a few minutes clicking through pieces of planned or hoped for waterfront construction, all of which struck me as more than a little parkish, and I have no idea which exact parts will be in the planned Waterfront Park and which won't.  Unfortunately for the planners, Pier 62, which one of those plans says historically used to host concerts and such, and which the parks department page says should do so again, hasn't been able to reach its full swing yet because of the epidemic.

I took several photos at Pier 62, but only one pier-scape, if you will, dear Diary:

Waterfront Park

Waterfront Park as was, was one of the largest parks in downtown Seattle.  It was essentially Pier 58, which was apparently huge, and which was at the end of Union St.  For a sense of its full glory, here's the Internet Archive with a 2018 version of its parks department web page.  Apparently, though, it wasn't built in 1974 to last as well as it needed; as a result, it fell apart during 2020, as described in a very helpful Seattle Met story by Annette Maxon.

Now, it's nothing but views, of which I took three, but, well, they weren't ideal view-photography circumstances and you know, dear Diary, that I'm an indifferent photographer at best.  So I'll only subject you to one:

Waterfront Park as it's planned to be should be 20 acres, making it enormously the biggest park in downtown Seattle, but should extend from Pioneer Square all the way to Pier 62, which stretches that size down so much, I don't know what they'll be able to fit into it.  In particular, though, Pier 58 is supposed to come back.

Seattle Aquarium

I was quite surprised to learn that the Seattle Aquarium, which is on Piers 59 and 60, is a parks department property; but so it is.  It's also very expensive, considerably more so than the Woodland Park Zoo.  So while I realise the whole point of this page, as of others in this particular series, is park appreciation, before I even get to the question of restrooms, I had no interest in appreciating this particular park, after I saw one of the signs in this photo:

Yep, "No Public Restrooms", just as if this institution were some two-bit restaurant.

I promise, dear Diary, to be much more appreciative of the parks in the next half of this page, which I should be able to tell you about tomorrow.  Until then, good night and good day.

Expected and Unexpected News from the University District

Dear Diary,

Today I got off work early, and although the weather tempted me to go hiking for you, I resisted, because I don't know when I'll next get a chance to go to the University of Washington's libraries.  I had three purposes there - one for you, which I accomplished (I'm now fairly confident that Roanoke Park really hasn't ever had restrooms); one for my writing about Korean dramas, which I accomplished (reading two standard references on Taoism in Korea); and one for my interest in science fiction, which I didn't accomplish (copying a book, my inability to read which is holding up yet another writing project).  C'est la vie.

Anyway, on the way there, I went to see the current status of the land where the beautiful old University Temple, formerly home to many good causes, including the Roots young adult shelter, which has moved, and the Urban Rest Stop's U-District location, piggybacking off of Roots's showers - anyway, the current status of the land where all that had stood.

 

On my way out of the libraries, it occurred to me that that photo might not be clear enough, so I decided to see if I could figure out where the water fountain used to be, and take a photo from there.  Actually, not only the structure that housed the water fountain, but some of its pipes, are still there (look in the bottom foreground).  I choose to take that as a physical sign that the new building will make room for good causes as well.  Anyway, the photo:

And, of course, dear Diary, you know me well enough to know what I did when I went home.

The Urban Rest Stop now admits that it no longer has a location there.  This change came sometime between May and September of this year:

Unfortunately, the map offered by the City of Seattle's Department of Human Services Homelessness Strategy and Investments Division, ostensibly of restrooms available to homeless and other people during the epidemic, the map I spent much of last winter hiking to check, has somehow not yet figured out that demolished restrooms aren't open:

Today, I seriously have no idea whether my current job will end tomorrow (one very possible consequence of the reason I left early today) or will become permanent.  Any people still working in that division are in somewhat similar situations, and I don't envy them, but I wish they had the grace to leave their current jobs without lying the way they did while those jobs were stable.

After taking the second photo up top, I looked at the University Bookstore for the novel I hadn't been able to copy at Suzzallo.  Being nearly ten years old, it wasn't there, of course, but as I browsed the remainders tables something flew out at me.  It's a translation of a novel from Swedish, and its title is what caught my attention:  How to Fall in Love with a Man Who Lives in a Bush.  (It's available, obviously, among the University Bookstore's remainders, but also in three formats from the Seattle Public Library.)  No, dear Diary, there isn't some strange twisted meaning to that title, it's actually a romance whose male lead is homeless:

Wikipedia on the author makes this even stranger:  Turns out she wrote what she knew, because she, an actress of all people, actually did marry a man who was homeless when they met.

I have no idea how long I'll be writing you, dear Diary, nor with how much intensity, but this gives me at least a little hope that someday I might not be hiking alone for you.  But that's how I intend to spend much of this weekend (if not, um, sooner), hiking alone, trying to finish visiting the downtown parks by day and then telling you about it.  Until then, good night and good days.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part IV: Central

Dear Diary,

This page's title is something of a "bait and switch".  That is, there's only one park in the central, narrowest part of Seattle's downtown.  But it's quite a park, and there are two other buildings with public restrooms that also figure in the pages to come.  So there's plenty to talk about, and I have enough photos that Blogspot is likely to complain.

Separately, these were my favourite parts of downtown during the years I lived on Capitol Hill, both housed (2006-2012) and homeless (2012-2014).   So this page is shaped both by my recent visits to these places, and by layers of my memory; it's much more personal to me than most recent pages in you, dear Diary.

As before, I'm going from smallest to largest.  In this case, if one does sufficiently apples to oranges comparisons, that's also south to north, and in addition, the order in which I paid attention to them.

Seattle Central Library

No, that isn't the format in which I've presented the branches of the Seattle Public Library to you, dear Diary.  I've never been employed by that library system, and I'm not quite sure, but I think they normally present the name of this library differently from the names of the others, so I've done that, maybe not correctly, here.  According to Wikipedia, this library opened in 2004, but there've been open library buildings at this location most of the time since 1906.  The land is considerably smaller than the park coming up next; the building is rather larger than that park, though not as large as the building coming last here.

At present, three of this library's floors are open to the public; normally, at least nine of them are.  The floors that are open are 1, 3, and 5.

The first floor has the children's area, the non-English-language area (books and DVDs), some seating, perhaps other areas I haven't explored, and also the big check-out, returns, card acquisition, and so forth area up front.  It's also where bus schedules are.  It has a big open area between the bus schedules, the kids' area, and the front desk, which may be where some events are held.

The second floor has never, to my knowledge, been open to the public.

The third floor has the new books area, the English-language DVDs, the graphic novels, the adult fiction and uncatalogued paperbacks, a number of public-use computers, a fair amount of seating, and the teens' area.  Oh, and the Friends of the Library's year-round store.  Some more check-out areas, and usually one person from the circulation department.  At least one reference librarian, not counting the person who staffs the teens' area.  And again, there may be more I'm forgetting or never knew.  My main interest in this floor during my poor years 2006-2012, as well as later, was the fiction shelves; also the DVDs, the new book shelves, the uncatalogued paperbacks and, when I was allowed in, the YA fiction shelves and uncatalogued paperbacks.  (This last is unrelated to the fact that I briefly had a crush on a YA librarian.)  As perhaps you can imagine, dear Diary, I didn't think various bookshelves would be all that photogenic.  But also, once I was homeless, I spent relatively little time on this floor.  It was popular with the public, who might react badly to my smell; few of its places to sit offered places to plug in my laptops.  If I needed to spend time on that floor to read something, I would hide in the northeast corner, as indeed I did yesterday out of habit (and because, with so few floors open, the seating on that floor is more crowded than ever).

The fourth floor has, I think, mainly meeting rooms; I have few memories of it, not, in general, being a meetings kind of person, and also disliking that floor's decor.  Its access is separate from the main routes through the library, which is probably how it's closed, and its content - meetings still being considered dangerous, at least for the host in the event of a superspreader, um, event - is probably why it's closed.

The fifth floor has mostly a vast array of public use computers.  To the east is an area that used to offer seating, but in recent years has been closed to the public so that volunteer tax preparers can offer their services year-round there.  To the north are relatively tech-savvy reference librarians.  My memories of this floor are tinged with regret, because for my first six years in Seattle I didn't have home net access, and so often had to go there to reach the Internet and Usenet, dealing with the computers' limitations (at the time, for example, only 1.5 hours per day, and no Firefox; as time went on, also no Notepad and no telnet...) ... well, they aren't entirely happy memories, let's just say.  On the other hand, for some strange reason the tech librarians are the keepers of copies of the current Seattle Bike Map.

Most of my homeless memories are of the floors above, which aren't open yet.  I could describe them from memory, and I'd probably get some stuff wrong, but not really so very much.  But what's the point?  In brief, the non-fiction, above all, lives there, as do the newspapers, the CDs (both anglophone and non), more graphic novels, seating far enough apart that I could often use it while homeless, more reference librarians, and on and on.  I know the Seattle Room on 9 or 10 is locally famous, but I had little interest in it before I was homeless, and was usually scared to enter such a confined space with my odours after.  On the other hand, I prided myself on mastering the Book Spiral.

The Seattle Central Library is famously photogenic, but mostly on the outside.  Some of its inside spaces - the talking heads on the escalator between 3 and 5, the soaring ceiling of 5, and, um, the soaring ceilings of and views from 10 - are, I think, probably worth photographing, but I didn't think to do so on my recent visits, just set my face against any library appreciation photos while my favourite places are still unreachable.  This is probably churlish of me, considering all that this building has given me over the years, but I still don't have photos to show you, so let's go on, dear Diary.

Jim Ellis Freeway Park

Freeway Park (now named after the guy who made it happen) is the largest single park property downtown.  I think it isn't actually the largest single park downtown, but we'll get to why I think that later.  Anyway, it's over four times bigger than City Hall Park, which in turn is bigger than Kobe Terrace, so it's by far the largest downtown park I've shown you so far, dear Diary; in North Seattle terms, it's somewhat larger than Wallingford Playfield, but considerably smaller than Loyal Heights Playfield.  It opened in 1976.  Its extremes are 6th Ave, Spring St, 9th Ave, and Pike St, but it doesn't fill that rectangle.  Most famously, it's built largely over Interstate Highway 5, the one whose bridge, further north, reaches North Seattle in Latona.  For this, for its designers' fame, and for its own special qualities good and bad, it is perhaps the most nationally or even internationally famous park in Seattle.

I'm pretty sure the only thing I've told you of Freeway Park before this, dear Diary, is that it's one of the perplexing parks I focused on while housed on Capitol Hill, along with Volunteer Park and, in North Seattle, Peace Park, in contrast to Cal Anderson Park, which was too straightforward for me then, but became rather more important to me after I became homeless.

Well, um, perplexing.  Yes indeed.  Freeway Park is demonically complex.  I found several parts of it yesterday that I'd never known existed, and I'm pretty sure I still don't know all its parts, even after reading the long chapter devoted to it in Alison Hirsch's 2005 dissertation, The Fate of Lawrence Halprin's Public Spaces: Three Case Studies.  Considering that it crams all these parts into not really all that large a space, and moreover is on several levels, I chose the word "demonically" with intent.  Some are set firmly against everything Freeway Park is, and can cite a number of gruesome crimes enabled by its complexity and corresponding areas of privacy.  One such person, strangely enough, is Charles Mudede, or at least he was in 2002; he's now the senior writer at The Stranger.

But I've always been, um, carefully fond of it.  It was a crossing-light-free route from Capitol Hill to within four lights of the Central Library.  Over time I found more reasons.  Let me show you.

I still have little love for the northernmost part, if it is a part, the plaza south of the next building.  For some bizarre reason the same woman (Angela Danadjieva) who designed Freeway Park rather later designed this plaza adjoining it into as desolate a windswept concrete plaza as I've ever seen.

It does have some redeeming elements - I like the sculpture on its north side:

And there are inscriptions in it.  I found two early on, which have gotten harder to see over the years, whether because they're getting worn or because my eyes are, I don't know.  One, running across the entrance from Pike St, appears to be in Coast Salish:

The other, near an entrance to Freeway Park more narrowly understood, appears to be from an old land deed.  This one I'm pretty sure has really faded, not just become harder for me personally to see.

Also, go back to that first photo for a moment.  The designers originally wanted, and for years got, the whole park lit by hundred-foot-tall floodlight posts like the one shown in it.  Once the trees grew up and obscured them, well, see Mudede's story.  Anyway, that's the first taste I tried to offer here of Freeway Park's weird.

But let's go on.  Across the sort of bridge that the deed inscription is on, one reaches the eastern, higher, open area of the park proper.  A building there that no longer serves its intended purpose properly has a wall that's been taken over by the Freeway Park Association, a group which Hirsch views darkly, but whose actual activities known to me have mostly been for what I see as the park's good.  (Some of the stupider, more philistine, suggestions attached to this group's many names, the ones that led Hirsch to her imprecations, may well have been squelched by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, but regardless, I haven't seen actual philistinism so far.)  ANYWAY, on one wall of this building they have a calendar.  But, um, yesterday...

Rounding this building's corner, I was delighted to find that my single favourite thing in this park, the annual display in October of kites made by Seattle children, had been extended, presumably by the same agency as had extended October on that calendar.  (Note the box to the side of the big calendar.  That has littler printed calendars, which were, yesterday, for November.)  A few kites, with a November newspaper:

There are many benches in this area, and although Hirsch complains of their being divided to prevent "new homeless" such as me, who first appeared soon after the park opened, from sleeping on them - well, let me just say that in those first two years of homelessness, I found naps possible, though maybe only because I'm so very short.  We'll get to another reason to like some of those benches, but here's a photo, though from further south:

South of this plaza, I know these pages are supposed to be about park appreciation, not plumbing, but what if one of the things worth appreciating is plumbing?  I've always loved this drinking fountain, and when I was new in town, I was firmly convinced of the myth that it was old enough, horses had had their own bowl.  (It is wooden, although I see now that my late-afternoon photo suggests concrete.)  I think it was shut down (possibly after I arrived - I have a very implausible memory of drinking from it) because of some infectious agent getting entrenched in it, and vandals have had their way since, but under the right circumstances, it can still be gorgeous:

To the west of this fountain is an underpass, which is pretty much the only shelter the park offers.  (According to Hirsch, Halprin wanted a shelter, but his customers didn't.)  I'll take this opportunity to note that while Mudede in 2002 wanted his readers afraid of this park's denizens, I've consistently found the homeless of Freeway Park rather less scary than many downtown homeless.  (I'll say the opposite of a park a ways ahead still.)

I found a sign in that underpass, and in a few other places around the park:

The sign refers to the Freeway Park Association's current manifesto, their declaration of how they intend to decide how to spend the money allocated to them, which is at an annoying site not under their control, so I haven't read it all yet, but it certainly gives the impression that the Association has, at least for the time being, thoroughly abjured philistinism.  Let's hope so.

Anyway, this underpass is, I'm pretty sure, only one of at least two and perhaps more ways to get from the upper, eastern, large area to the lower, western one.  Much of the western area is actually on private property; the builder of the building on 6th Ave there agreed to some kind of deal to make it smaller but swankier, and allow part of the park to be built on the area thus saved.  I took a random photo of the Christmas lights up too early, but at least in multiple colours:

I'm not, in general, a big fan of the aesthetic of decay, but I think it's entirely appropriate to this park that that big boring red heart has, by the failure of some bulbs, been turned into something much stranger and harder to identify.

Halprin ran the firm that won the contract, partly because he's famously associated with the idea of lidding highways (though a Seattle architect came up with it first), and I assume he exerted some sort of executive authority, but Hirsch, possibly with the polemical purpose of establishing that Halprin's art used to be popular, emphasises the collaborative nature of the work.  My guess, however, would be that the big fountains in this western part of the park were more specifically Halprin's work.  The Association's website and manifesto offer photos of the fountains running, but I can only offer ones of them dead.  The Cascade fountain was made for children to play in, and still offers what's probably the original obligatory warning:

The Canyon fountain further east is less participatory; one may only walk through it along a well-defined path, which takes one pretty easily to the Easter egg Halprin put into it, a window through which one can watch the traffic on I-5.  Unfortunately, most of the window is scutched up, I think mainly with decades of exhaust, perhaps also with graffiti, so I was only able to glimpse the traffic, and evidently failed in three tries to catch any of it.

Much of what gets me tentatively approving of the Association is that they want to get those fountains running again; now they only run, way below full strength, on special occasions.

Another thing to like about the concrete-floored west plaza, with the kitschy primary-coloured tables and chairs on which people sit when Association-sponsored events happen, is that it's where the Friends of the Library run an extension of their bookshop, summers only.  Here's one of the carts, parked for the winter.

Unfortunately they can only staff it for a couple of hours per day, weekday lunchtimes; since that didn't usually coincide with my visits to the library, I rarely found it open.  But I did get there The Silent Governess by Julie Klassen, which I think was the first work of specifically Christian fiction I actually liked.  (I liked even more her previous, first, books, The Lady of Milkweed Manor and The Apothecary's Daughter; the later ones turned out to get progressively more ordinary, at least as far as I read, which I think is The Painter's Daughter.)

One of the areas I was unfamiliar with in Freeway Park is everything south of Seneca Street, which was where I thought the park ended.  I can thank Hirsch for correcting that mistake of mine.  Yes, Seneca divides Freeway Park, as does an I-5 exit.  Here's one more fountain, but not by Halprin (any more than I think Halprin made the wooden drinking fountain), but by Seattle's George Tsutakawa:

And oops, now I've gone from north to south through the park, when I was trying to go south to north in this page!  Well, we'll hurry back to that dead concrete plaza, but on the way, while I'm not talking about plumbing in these pages, that needn't get me to ignore all mundane amenities, and here's one more photo of a Freeway Park bench:

Do you see that tiny green light shining from its end, dear Diary?  That's the sign that one can charge things from that bench.  Not all the benches offer this, and when I was homeless in those parts, most of the ones that did, didn't work.  Hence my years-ago trip to Occidental Square.  But I saw two or three such lights on yesterday's visit.  Is this another Association improvement, or someone else's work?  I don't know, but I'm glad at least one recent change in Freeway Park is clearly more to the benefit of homeless people than of anyone else.

Next, a sadder story.  I'm pettishly peeved at the library, but have no real complaints; you've seen how much I really did enjoy Freeway Park and how hopeful I actually am; but up ahead, something that ended worse.

The Washington State Trade and Convention Center

The Washington State Convention Center, as their name apparently officially now is, is a taxing authority, and therefore public, not a private company, but as seen by this homeless man, it was private.  The story was that for permission to build the building the way they wanted, they made a deal to offer public amenities.  They confirm this in a plaque laying claim to the plaza south of the building (not realising how embarrassing it really is, to say that that plaza is the best one can do in providing public amenities).  This was also the explanation I heard for seating areas on the first, second, and fourth floors (though most of these also serve the retail businesses the WSCC has as tenants), for occasionally accessible Wi-Fi, and for other amenities I'm trying not to talk about here.

One of my temp jobs in my early years in Seattle, sometime between 2006 and 2008, was at the Convention Center; for some reason they needed extra people for some particular event, to set up and take down rooms.  I have no other inside knowledge.  I met a man while doing that job who seemed likely to become my first real friend in Seattle, until we disagreed sharply about ethical responses to witnessing violence.

Once I was homeless, I found that it opened earlier than the library, so on days I was going to that library from the places on Broadway where I slept or from my storage on 12th, it was a great place to eat breakfast after doing stuff these pages aren't supposed to mention.  I was firmly wedded to a small area on the 2nd floor that has tables that stretched my memory of flags and ability to identify languages:

 

That area has triple trash - recycling, compost and landfill - and one of the things I did, trying to "pay rent" for being there, was put things in, and sometimes move things to, the correct bin.  This was also one way of getting newspapers; another was that sometimes the employed people who had their breakfasts there left their papers behind, on their tables.

Here's another view (which turns out to have caught those trash cans at the far right):

 

One amenity the building did not provide was electricity.  With complete impartiality the security guys would stop homeless people, commuters, or conventioneers from charging anything at the outlets in the middle of that area's floor.  (The rule against sleeping there, in practice, fell mainly against the homeless, but I have seen drunk conventioneers woken up too.)

The walls of the 2nd floor were usually filled with art works with some local connection, often representing this or that association of painters, or competition, or something like that.  On occasion, some of the art had something to do with science fiction or fantasy, and I would inform a relevant Usenet newsgroup.  Unfortunately, the art displays haven't yet revived, possibly because the conventions that might result in those artworks selling haven't either.

I was never interested in the public seating on the 1st floor - uncomfortable chairs, drafty location, and way too many people walking through.  But there's an interesting fountain on the way in:

There's a much larger seating area south of the one I liked, with more ordinary tables but the same comfortable chairs.  It hosts Juicy Cafe, whose employees sometimes gave homeless people the leftovers when they closed up shop, and its walls have a very weird conceptual art piece on which I spent way too much time:

When I sat in that area, out of gratitude for the occasional food from Juicy and for the Convention Center as a whole, I almost always only sat on the concrete ledges around its sides, not at the tables.

The third floor is supposed to be off-limits to the public.  Unfortunately, since it's where the building's permanent art collection is, it's currently got the most interesting hallways to wander.

I rarely used the 4th floor seating area, which is buried behind various parts of the setup for welcoming guests to the conventioneers-only parts of the building.  People tended to stay a long time there, and the tables were a bit too close together for my comfort.  (There's also a public seating area right in front of the shops on that floor, but to me it was always obvious that I should keep out of there, and I didn't want the company of homeless people or just troublemakers who didn't share my scruples.)  What started me taking these photos yesterday, unfortunately, was the discovery that the secluded area is now roped off; I don't know whether that's because of something COVID-related, or an intentional change for the long term.

The story of how I lost any desire to visit the Convention Center, for years until this series, has to wait for the main series to which this one is merely a prologue.  Good night, dear Diary.