The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part II: Southeast

Dear Diary,

This is the first of six pages I'm writing in you in this series, which is one of two series I plan in order to prepare for my claim that downtown Seattle park and other restrooms have been available in the past but no longer are, which is in turn preparation for my broader claim that Seattle under-values park and other restrooms so much that it sometimes throws them away.  So this is essentially a long digression, and it's time to get started so it'll be over with sooner.

This page concerns four parks and one library.  In memory of my mistaken belief that a park's plumbing correlates with its area in downtown Seattle, I'm going in reverse order of area.  All photos on this page were taken yesterday, November 6.

International District / Chinatown Community Center

This is the smallest property in this series.  But it's a building, so of course it has restrooms.  Stupid me.  It dates back to 2014, and is on 8th Ave S between S Lane St and S Dearborn St; as I'm defining downtown for this series, it's basically in the southeastern corner.

I went there Friday (November 5) on my lunch, and then again yesterday.  Friday, the door was locked, but a woman came to it and let me in once she saw that I was masked and looked at my vaccination card.  She allowed me to take pictures of the plumbing, and told me that the center is not, in fact, open to the public at this time.  It's holding various programs, but the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation by policy is requiring that contact tracing be possible in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak, so the programs are admitting only registered participants.  She said there's one program, a weekly ping-pong event for people over 50, for which registration on the spot is allowed.  (This appears to represent a considerable variation on a program linked from the Community Center's website, which is referred to as "drop-in" but requires pre-registration, happens a lot more often than weekly, and charges a fee based on age, without restriction to a single age group.)  I came back yesterday just to photograph its doorway, in which I found no hours sign either day.  Friday was, I think, my first visit indoors to a Seattle Community Center, so I won't profess any opinion as to how nice this particular one is.

Seattle Public Library - International District / Chinatown branch

I've been to this branch to borrow Korean TV drama DVDs and to look around since it re-opened this summer, and of course specifically contrasted its accessible water fountain with the then-stopped water fountains at the Pierce County Library branches to which I also was going for similar DVDs.  But for this project I went there the same two days, Friday and yesterday, and again took just one photo not of plumbing, yesterday.  Unfortunately, this branch, which is normally open seven days a week, is currently closed Saturdays, so this photo kind of mis-represents it; sorry.

This branch is next door to the Community Center, north of it, and although I usually feel that it's kind of small, according to the 2020 real property report it's eleven times bigger than the center, and bigger than four other downtown parks properties and three of the Seattle Department of Transportation's downtown parks (taken individually, that is).  It opened in 2005.

Donnie Chin International Children's Park

This is a small, street-corner park on the northeast corner of 7th Ave S and S Lane St.  It has an extensive Wikipedia article whose full history agrees with a plaque on site that it opened in 1981.  It was, however, extensively re-landscaped ten years ago.

It seems a pleasant enough spot, with a shelter:

a small playground:

and, despite the prominence of a brick plaza in my photos, some grass and trees.  Also, some art - I didn't note it at the time, but what else could that dark ball on the divider be?  Can't have a downtown park without art.

Hing Hay Park

This is the area's clearly Chinese park.  It occupies the northern side of S King St from Maynard Ave S to 6th Ave S, roughly half a block.  It's actually rather smaller than Little Brook Park, the smallest North Seattle park with a restroom, so I would have ignored it given my original plans for this project, except that it's on my way to and from work.  So I visited it very unobervantly sometime early on, failing to notice anything plumbing-related; later I formed an impression which the Wikipedia article corrects by dividing the park in two.

Apparently the eastern half of the park opened in 1973 thanks to a considerable personal gift from the then-mayor of Taipei.  Wikipedia's only reference for this is pretty slender, and there's no mention of it in the English Wikipedia article on one possibility, Henry Kao, or the Chinese Wikipedia article on the other, Huang Ch'i-Jui, so I don't know whether this is yet another poorly documented bit of Seattle's recent history, or an urban legend.  Kao was apparently democratically elected, even though Taipei was then the capital city of a US-allied military dictatorship, and neither he nor (appointed) Huang is referred to as rich, although politicians in dictatorships usually are.

Anyway, as a result, eastern Hing Hay Park looks relatively conventionally oriental in the kind of way someone my age, who grew up in the 1970s, would expect.

 

(Yes, there's a water fountain.  I was very unobservant at Hing Hay Park, one of the things that convinced me I needed to re-visit a bunch of parks with plenty of time and daylight, starting yesterday.)

Anyway, in 2017 the park doubled in size, a project ten years in the making.  Seattle hired designers from Beijing, but by 2017 the American image of the Far East had changed pretty drastically.

Yes, that sculpture is yet another piece of art in a downtown park, but that's not actually why I photographed it.  The most striking thing for me in western Hing Hay Park is a bunch of short staircases in which most of the steps' risers are punctured, as that sculpture is, with lots of tiny triangles.  Through the punctures in the risers, however, red light shines, creating images.  My phone wasn't up to photographing the light sculptures, so I photographed the conventional one instead.  Western Hing Hay Park is high-tech.

In between the halves are two ping-pong tables.  One is yellow, and may well be the one removed from Cal Anderson Park.  They get a lot more use at Hing Hay than I've ever seen on Capitol Hill.

Kobe Terrace

Kobe Terrace is the specifically Japanese park, built in an area that used to be part of Japantown.  It's named after Seattle's Japanese sister city, Kobe, which is a port west of Osaka on Honshu.  It occupies an irregular area between 6th Ave S, I-5, S Washington St and S Main St, and its main trail links to Yesler Way.  It opened in 1976.

This whole area is very hilly.  The park is considered to include the Danny Woo Community Garden (opened a few years earlier), which is probably the majority of the space; what's left of Kobe Terrace proper is not so large and is pretty steep.  Amenities include a trail, benches and garbage cans; otherwise, it's mostly woods.

The park's official address is "Maynard Ave S" but if one goes up Maynard, one reaches the garden, and I didn't easily find a route from there to the park.  Go up 7th instead.  Or cross I-5 going west on Yesler on the south sidewalk, and turn left at the first place that offers.

Well, dear Diary, those are the parks of the southeast of Seattle's downtown.  I hope still today to tell you about the more numerous, but mostly smaller, parks of Seattle's southwest downtown, but have to do other things now if I'm to hike, or do any of my personal errands, today.  Until later, then, have a good day.