Dear Diary,
Today I had to go to Home Depot to deal with some problems left (I hope) by a departing housemate (the topic of the public good has been on my mind a whole lot lately), and decided to extend the trip to include Bitter Lake Playfield, which isn't especially close to Home Depot, but also isn't especially close to anywhere else I go either, so why not? While there I tried to talk myself into going to all three of the Greenwood parks with plumbing, but finally settled for going only to the one some of whose plumbing was closed earlier this year. So that's why those two parks today.
I took the scenic route to Aurora, meaning I went through Woodland Park. Still no sweep, still no sweep announcements. I don't get it, but maybe some official drove up to a sign I saw there:
and actually paid attention. (Maybe the photo isn't as clear as I intended: someone has added to the base sign "IN THE NAME OF LOVE".) Or maybe they're waiting for the rain to return, to make the sweep even more cruel. I don't know.
Anyway, the other two parks present very different (though, underneath, related) pictures, so I should probably separate them, but before I do: Most of the photos of Bitter Lake, and one of the photos of Licton Springs, are at the Google Drive folders (Bitter Lake, Licton Springs), so are securely dated.
Bitter Lake Playfield
Last time I was at this park, I found a running water fountain near the playground that I hadn't previously noticed. This was during the second year's part of what I've called the Durkan Drought; near as I can figure, that fountain was replacing fountains at Northacres Park that had been running during the first year's part, but not the second.
I also found what looked like metal thieves' work on one of the two bowls of the water fountain I'd already known about, and concluded that neither bowl was likely to run soon, because I assumed their plumbing must be so linked that one running while the other lacked a spout and piping would produce flooding.
Well, turns out the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has standardised on a smarter design of water fountain than that. Look, dear Diary:
This is a good thing, too, because both the non-running bowl of this fountain, and the fountain near the playground, have clogged drains, so their bowls are full. (The lower of the above shots got my newspaper section wet.) Here's the playground fountain:
I also found the restrooms open. Now, they'd been open in spring, so this wasn't a great surprise, but there are some issues about those restrooms. First, last autumn they weren't open because of construction delays, and I found one of the "sanican" substitutes burnt (or maybe that was winter?), just as I found such a "sanican" substitute burnt at University Playground yesterday. Second, ever since last summer I've suspected these restrooms of being open 24 hours, on two grounds: people there at the time said they were, and they were open far too late on that visit to be locked by parks department personnel. (But locking them could still be left for hired security guys, as at Green Lake Park last winter.)
So I went back to Bitter Lake Playfield tonight. I wasn't there noticeably later than on my first visit over a year ago, so this still isn't conclusive, but I found them open later than 9 P.M. again.
And yes, I realise those photos don't prove anything here, but they're both at the Google Drive folder, where their times survive uploading.
Anyway, that brings me to the third issue about Bitter Lake Playfield's restrooms. They'll probably be under construction again next year. It looks like designs are being finalised for a complete rebuild of the playground and restroom building (that's what the large sign on the women's room gate is about). The existing building was closed last winter, though for "historic low usage" rather than unreadiness for Seattle's winters, so will probably be closed this winter, and then under construction until that's done. Which means the next time I can afford to visit the park at 2 A.M. or some other such decisive time is probably going to be too late.
The reason the "sanican" was burnt last autumn or winter, I assume, has to do with the reason "historic low usage" was such a stupid criterion then: There's been a huge and famous homeless camp at that Playfield throughout the pandemic. Except that when the parks department began to flex some muscle to get them to move, many moved to the school property next door; and when sweeps of other parks really got going, still more did. A sweep of Bitter Lake has been long postponed because our wonderful mayor declared that encampments on school property were the exclusive business of the Seattle Public Schools, which neither have staff to deal with this kind of thing at all, nor want to be demonised for sweeps. Another issue, though, was that the border between the Playfield and the School seems not to have been clear. That, at least, someone has decided is settled:
And today, for the first time in my experience, all the tents were on the School side of that fence.
But they had left some parting gifts behind on the Playfield side:
This is clearly homeless-encampment trash - it includes several mattress-like items - and it struck me as, on top of the burnt "sanican", more than a little mean-spirited. The people who will have to clean it up are not the people who make decisions the campers object to, and the decision-makers are unlikely even to notice the .1% increase in parks trash costs that results.
Anyway, Bitter Lake for today represents a very different scenario from Licton Springs, though both sets of restrooms would normally close in November (and for the same reason).
Licton Springs Park
Most of the photos I took of Licton Springs aren't at the Google Drive folder, and that doesn't matter, because my news here is old and, apparently, to everyone but me, unimportant.
The Seattle Fire Department announced on September 4th, on Twitter, a fire under control at Licton Springs Park, in a "cinder block type structure". Near as I can tell, nobody else, not even some neighbourhood blog, has reported on this fire.
The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation already knows how to deal with this kind of thing, from years of practice at Magnuson Park:
Unfortunately, here the water fountains, which ran during both phases of the Durkan Drought, are attached to the restroom building, so are inside the fence.
One commenter on Twitter wondered if the fire was started by a "vagrant's campfire". This would not be an unreasonable thing to wonder, in the abstract, but having seen the results even two months later, I doubt it. This fire burned hot, and it created a whole lot of ash, which has drifted all over the place. I think at some level this fire was arson, whether in complaint against the closure of the restrooms, or as a way of preventing future homeless camps there like the slobs whose obnoxiously messy occupation in 2020 (largely on top of federally protected wetlands) was what led the parks department to close the restrooms this spring in the first place. Arson is traditionally for profit, and I don't see that here, but this fire has in common with arson that - at least in my uninformed opinion - it was planned.
More photos trying, and probably failing, to back these claims up:
At any rate, now I see that University Playground's restrooms still have at least one step to go before demolition: a fence.
I would not be optimistic about any specific fenced-in restroom, however. The tower building at Magnuson Park has, after all, been fenced in for five years, and is considerably more urgent, from any sensible parks perspective, to fix, than either Licton Springs's or University's restrooms. The boarded-up doors at Woodland Park's "Rio" (Citywide Athletic Building) men's room and one of the single-user stalls at Matthews Park probably represent smaller versions of the same 'We might get to it someday, if funds allow' situation.
Some meta notes
I've been finding that photo-heavy Blogspot pages - specifically, yours, dear Diary, and Cliff Mass's weather blog's - are essentially impossible for me to load with all their photos at the same time, at the moment. This appears not to represent my house's Wi-Fi choking (I get similar results on my phone without Wi-Fi), so I suspect Blogspot itself is unable, at present, to deal properly with blogs like this one. My apologies to anyone else affected by this. I still prefer to show you the photos, dear Diary, because I don't have much storage on the phone with which I take them - which has now taken to reminding me, with most shots, that it's taking time to store them - and because I assume sooner or later Blogspot will take care of the problem.
Anyway, I spent so much time today in North Seattle that I can't even finish the other page(s) meant to back up my claims about throwing amenities away, let alone the pages actually explaining those claims, before the election. At some level, this is right: your remit, after all, dear Diary, is North Seattle parks, and that other page isn't even about North Seattle. But I can't actually keep spending entire weekends on you anyway, and you should learn the value of solidarity, so I hope you'll bear with me that this is the second-last "today" post for some time to come. Until the last, good night and good days, dear Diary.
Anyone who wants references to the events discussed above in the parks mentioned, and is reading on a phone, should please ask his or her browser to behave like a desktop one, and then re-load this page. Desktop readers get access to "labels", what everyone else in the world calls tags, which enable pulling up other pages with related topics. I don't have time tonight to do all the links I did with last night's post (for which I'd hoped for far more readers than it looks like it'll get).
On the off chance that anyone reads this page who cares how I plan to vote: for the big four races that have led The Seattle Times to wax apocalyptic, and have led to so much advertising advocacy, a straight left ticket - I want to see whether the progressive project can succeed under even optimum conditions, before changing my basic allegiance, and also at least two of the progressives' opponents have openly broken laws recently - even though all the opponents, but none of the progressives, have sent me mail; but the remaining races, I now have very little time to decide about.
Anyway, dear Diary, don't expect such late posts in future: the troublesome housemate who left was my next door and only real neighbour in this house, but his room won't stay empty forever, and one major reason I'm typing so late is that I also had to do laundry almost so late (it finished before this page!), after that second visit today to Bitter Lake, and might as well violate quiet time some more, circumstances I'll try not to let happen again. So again, good night.
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