The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

In case it hasn't been obvious enough yet, the other region from which I make my case that Seattle too lightly throws restrooms away is the city's downtown.  But I started work on this series of pages with the mistaken assumption that in downtown parks, as in the more familiar parks of North Seattle, park area would correlate with the availability of plumbing.  Stupidly, I postponed looking at the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's web pages for most of the parks - the ones I'd dismissed as too small - until just a few days ago.  So I'm still hiking, in fact, got home maybe twenty minutes before starting this page.

The parks department, in the 2020 Real Property Report which I still use as authoritative, had a classification called "Downtown Parks".  I inferred from this classification's 22 members that the borders of downtown, as seen by the department,  were roughly Mercer St on the north, I-5 on the east, Dearborn St on the south, and the water on the west.  One of those members is actually mainly east of I-5, so is not part of this particular series.  However, six more parks department parks do fit within these borders, as do five Seattle Department of Transportation parks.  (In North Seattle, Peace Park and the Wallingford Steps are parks listed on the parks department website but actually owned by SDOT.)  So this particular series introduces 32 parks.

Here's a map showing where they are [edit 11/7:  A corrected map is at the bottom of this page now.]:

This map also indicates the general area of Seattle Center, which is yet another city department unto itself.  It does not show the two Seattle Public Library branches present within these borders - Central and International District / Chinatown - but the underlying symbol of an open book, from the map's source, Open Street Map, is visible and shows their locations.

These sites group, geographically, into six groups, I think:

• Southeast, essentially the Chinatown and Japantown parts of the International District.  Little Saigon is, I think, mostly on the other side of I-5 (as is my current workplace, though I think of it as being downtown).  This group consists of, from north to south, Kobe Terrace, Hing Hay Park, Donnie Chin International Children's Park, and the International District / Chinatown Community Center.  The library of the same name is next door north of that community center.
• Southwest, the area generally known as Pioneer Square, the city's most prominent historical core.  This group consists of, from west to east, Fortson Square (an SDOT property), Occidental Square, Pioneer Square proper, Washington Square (SDOT), Prefontaine Place, Union Station Square, and City Hall Park.
• Central, Seattle's corporate centre and the narrowest part of downtown, has only two of these properties, Freeway Park and the Central Library.
  
• Northwest, downtown Seattle's waterfront parks.  From south to north, this group consists of the old Waterfront Park that was on Pier 58, the Pike Street Hillclimb (SDOT, and apparently not shown on the PNG version of the map Blogspot will let me use), the Seattle Aquarium, Piers 62 and 63 (which the parks department represents as a down payment on the new Waterfront Park), Victor Steinbrueck Park, Myrtle Edwards Park, Alaskan Way Boulevard (shown on the PNG version, but near as I can tell not actually existent), and the downtown part of the Elliott Bay Trail (which may or may not be SDOT-owned; shown on the PNG in Open Street Map's reliable version, as opposed to the sketch I put into the original SVG map).  This area also includes two parks not exactly city-owned:  the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, and the Port of Seattle's Centennial Park (or anyway its southern half).  (The ownership of all the northern parks in this group is actually about as clear as mud from the real property report and the facts on the ground.  But in particular the plumbing in both Olympic and Centennial isn't at all in the style of Seattle city parks.)
  
• North-central, essentially Belltown.  Along Bell from Elliott to 5th and then along 5th north, this group consists of the Belltown Cottages and Ppatch, Bell Street Park Boulevard, Regrade Park, the Belltown Community Center, Tilikum Place (SDOT), and Seattle Center.  [This paragraph edited 11/7 to add Regrade Park and make other corrections.  The map above also gets the locations of the Belltown Cottages and Belltown Ppatch wrong, and omits Regrade Park.  See revised map below.]
  
• Northeast, basically along Westlake.  South to north, this group consists of Westlake Park, McGraw Square, Westlake Square, Urban Triangle Park, Denny Park, and Cascade Playground. 

First of all, I should note that most downtown Seattle "squares" are actually triangles, like North Seattle's Wedgwood Square.  Occidental Square is an exception.  Also, one way downtown parks differ from parks elsewhere in Seattle is that they all have some art in them, even the smallest and most trivial.

I've already visited, for this project, both libraries, all the large parks (but not Seattle Center), and all the parks in the southeast, southwest, and northwest groups.  I hope tomorrow to tell you, dear Diary, about the southeast and southwest parks.  I need to return to some of the northwestern ones, which is unfortunate, because it always rains hard when I visit those parks, so many people may curse my name early tomorrow afternoon.  I also need to go back to Freeway Park, and do some reading, before writing about "central".

I don't seriously expect to finish the other two sets, in each of which I've already visited some, but not all, of the parks, tomorrow, or very soon.  I'll tell you about them once I do, dear Diary.

These parks vary widely in age - Denny Park, first opened in 1884, is usually considered the city's oldest park - and in how much I know or can learn about their history, so I don't promise a complete account of how many downtown restrooms have been thrown away over the years.  In any event, though, the pages that follow aren't actually about that.  Instead, they're about the parks as parks, because it finally dawned on me that if I didn't write about them before getting into their plumbing, nobody might write about them as I like.

That said, it's time tonight for me to do other things, dear Diary, so good night, and see you tomorrow.

[Edit 11/7:  This version not only adds Regrade Park and moves the Belltown Cottages and the Belltown Ppatch, but also moves and makes visible the Pike Street Hillclimb, moves the Alaskan Way Boulevard, which may exist after all, and moves Myrtle Edwards Park.]