Sunday, November 7, 2021

The North Seattle Parks History Files of Don Sherwood

Dear Diary,

Yeah, I was wrong.  I have to do laundry tonight, which means I can't be watching the Korean drama I've started.  So I decided to start looking into the history of the waterfront parks, and then faced the fact that I've been ignoring a major resource all along.

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's web pages for individual parks routinely quote "park historian Don Sherwood".  Sherwood (1916-1981, employee 1955-1977) was actually a department engineer who made park maps for his work, then started writing historical notes on them, then full-blown historical accounts when the maps ran out of room.  The first few times I consulted these files, I wasn't impressed, because I couldn't get the answers I wanted from them.  Well, stupid me.  They're still a valuable resource, and I'm disappointed in myself to have waited so long to use them.

The Seattle Municipal Archives offers them as PDFs.  Various bits and pieces go into those PDFs, reassembled in various ways, so anyone who reads the PDFs on parks close to each other is likely to see some of the same pages twice.  The preceding paragraph cribs shamelessly from the introduction to the index page.  The rest of this cribs shamelessly from the rest of that page.  I flag the ones that are indicated as over 1000K with an asterisk *.

From what I've looked at so far, I'm not sure how consistently he paid attention to restrooms, but he certainly sometimes mapped them (e.g. Magnuson).  I haven't found water fountains indicated on the maps I've looked at yet.

I hope you enjoy reading these and finding my mistakes over the next few days, dear Diary.  Now, really, good night.

 

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