Dear Diary,
Well, I'd done the first of the chores I needed to do in order to go hiking today, and by the time I was done it was pouring rain. So I decided to exercise one of the privileges of the housed and stay home today, instead of running errands (which can be done at night) or going hiking (which can't, really). The time change last night actually means that it'll be dark by the time I leave work, for some time to come, and for however long, within that time, as my current job lasts. Since photos taken in the dark tend not to do what I want them to, and since it's hard to find park features in the dark, the temptation to take in a park on my way home will be greatly reduced.
It therefore won't be any sooner than Thursday that I can tell you about the parks of northwest or central downtown, and we'll just have to see about the north-central and northeastern parks. And in general, this project is eliminating any chance of my doing a thorough North Seattle water fountain hike this autumn, before they all get shut off. I am, in general, reasonably sure the fountains are, even now that the temperature has begun dropping closer to freezing, back to normal, whatever normal means for any particular fountain, and modulo the actions of repairers and of thieves; the parks both downtown and otherwise which I've visited for the current project have reinforced that belief in me.
Regardless, this decision gave me plenty of time today to tell you about the southwest downtown parks, which I visited by broad, if rainy, daylight yesterday. Again, in order smallest to largest.
Fortson Square
One important peculiarity of the parks of southwestern downtown is that they don't have much greenery. The exceptions are the smallest, Fortson Square, and the largest. By the time I got here yesterday, I'd visited four plant-free parks in a row (all of the next five except Prefontaine Place - also plant-free, but not then yet visited), and I was kind of tired of it, so I was gung-ho for Fortson Square.
Fortson Square is a tiny park owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation, which considers it a park although the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation does not. It's a triangle between Yesler Way on the north, 2nd Ave Ext S on the southwest, and the line taken, further south, by 2nd Ave S on the east. (My thanks to Open Street Map, which located it for me when Google Maps couldn't.) It has existed in various forms since 1901 (George Hayley Fortson was an officer killed in the Spanish-American War). It has had pretensions to elegance (look near the bottom of this photo), and like all downtown parks it now hosts art (look near the top of this photo):
And it currently has a further reason for enthusiasm:
Union Station Square
Most of the parks of southwest downtown are brick plazas to which their owners try to attract people with two things: art, as usual in downtown parks, and bus stops. Part of the point of attracting people is that parks' makers, by and large, want people to experience parks, but another part of the goal is to deter campers. However, at Union Station Square, the art, just by existing, people or no, emphatically deters campers:
Ironically, that's conceptual art in which the words engraved on the blocks are railroad-related. No doubt this is in honour of the train station across the street, but I couldn't help thinking of hoboes, and as I walked away, of the differences among the "new homeless" (people more or less like me, 1970s to the present), the "old homeless" (mostly drunks, such as Bowery bums, 1950s to 1970s), and their predecessors (hoboes, Okies, and vagrants).
Nobody seems to know when the park opened, but the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods points out that it must have been after the construction of 2nd Ave Ext S, in 1928-1929, making hoboes an entirely pertinent referent. It's the triangle between 2nd Ave Ext S, 3rd Ave S, and S Jackson St.
Prefontaine Place
Prefontaine Place is the triangle between Jefferson St, 3rd Ave, and Yesler Way. It was left to the city by Henry Yesler to build a library on, but was too small for that, so was given to the city. By that time Francis Xavier Prefontaine, Seattle's first Roman Catholic priest, had left $5,000 to the city to build a fountain. So in 1926 the city finally opened a park with a fountain in it. The gist of this is in this park's parks department site, but much fuller detail is at the DON page; neither page includes the testators' dates of death, but Wikipedia has articles on both.
It isn't much of a bus stop, because it's right next to an entrance to what is now the Pioneer Square train station. The art is the fountain, which has its own Wikipedia article although the park does not. (Notice the turtles.)
The parks department site currently includes a closure notice for fountain cleaning in December. The dates in that notice are no more recent than 2019.
Washington Square
This is directly south of Fortson Square, the triangle between 2nd Ave Ext S, 2nd Ave S, and S Washington St. It's about six times as big as Fortson Square, though. Essentially no information about it turned up in my searches, probably partly because Google is so much more interested in commercial uses of the name. But also, it's owned by SDOT, and a much more perfunctory park than the smaller one, or, really, any of the smaller ones so far described:
So why would anyone but a completist like me bother to talk about it online at all? I thought, on first seeing Cedar Park and Little Brook Park in Lake City, that the minimum requirements for a Seattle park were grass and a playground. In downtown Seattle, it's bricks and art instead.
Pioneer Square
Speaking of art:
Pioneer Square is the smallest of the three big parks of southwest downtown Seattle. I've shown you, dear Diary, pictures of it before, in several of your pages about street water fountains. Pioneer Square contains a building that's sort of a shelter, so it's been chosen by campers pretty much ever since I can remember it, which I'm pretty sure goes back before I was homeless myself. Its most recent sweep had been the day before I visited yesterday:
It's the triangle between 1st Ave, Yesler Way, and the line of 1st Ave after it turns north of the park, with a small border on James St. Information about its history is obscured by results about the neighbourhood named for it, but apparently it's been public land since the 1880s. As that page implies, it's rich in old neat stuff. I, however, took a landscape shot:
As I was leaving Pioneer Square, I was hailed by a man I'd met when we both raided the U-District Half Price Books recycling bin for books. I don't think he'd ever been quite homeless, but insecurely housed; he'd then lived in South King County and more or less supported himself trying to sell books obtained free, such as there, but he said he'd lost his vehicle, and of course HPB has closed. He now lives in the Pioneer Square neighbourhood. We talked about the election, in which, it turned out, we'd voted differently across the board, and about you, dear Diary, and I gave him my e-mail address. It's difficult, but neat, to find people who were friendly while I was homeless, so, dear Diary, please don't begrudge this encounter the half-hour of park photography it cost.
Occidental Square
This is the only, um, rectangular "square" in these parts. It's somewhat more than a half-block along Occidental Ave S between S Main St and S Washington St, about twice the size of Pioneer Square. Everyone says it opened in 1971, though I'm not convinced the 1971 park was the first park on the site. It includes the fire fighters' memorial which was the scene of a famous attack on a homeless sleeper in 2014, but in general I haven't noticed nearly as many campers here as in Pioneer Square, though, certainly, at any given time plenty of the people here appear to be homeless. The main context in which I encountered Occidental Square prior to writing you, dear Diary, is that early in my homelessness I was having trouble charging my laptop, and was told that there were public charging stations at this park. Well, I found outlets, but not a realistic way to use them in the rain. My theory was that the outlets made this a sort of no man's land, like the picnic shelters in Woodland Park that appear to have functioned as shared kitchens for the tent campers around them. But it turns out that for several years the Downtown Seattle Association has managed this park, and that's probably why it's little camped in.
Anyway, again, dear Diary, I've shown you photos before in the street fountain context, and it was raining, so I settled for a single landscape shot this time.
City Hall Park
This, twice the size of Occidental Square, is the only park in southwest downtown bigger than Little Brook Park, and so the only one I concentrated on at first. It's between 3rd Ave, 4th Ave, the line of Jefferson St (which starts at 4th), and Yesler Way; it shares the block it's on, from Yesler to James St, with the King County Courthouse, while Seattle's present City Hall is a block north on 4th. It's split into two by a micro-street, Dilling Way. There's some disagreement about when the park opened, but Writes of Way seems to be correct that it was in 1911, since there was apparently still a city hall on it in 1909.
It seems to consist of grassy swards and benches. (I don't seem to have caught them in these photos, but there's a whole row of wooden benches, not just these stone ones.)
It's been much in the news recently. An encampment was swept in August. Over the summer there were many complaints that people with business in the courthouse felt unsafe passing that encampment, sometimes with examples of campers actually doing things that might justify that fear. In late July, a man attacked a woman inside a women's room at the courthouse; he's been reported to be schizophrenic, a meth addict, and, no surprise given those things, homeless, but not to be a camper at that particular camp. However, there was a fatal stabbing at a camp in this park in 2019.
Personally, I've been afraid of many homeless people downtown, to a greater or lesser extent, more or less the whole time I've lived in Seattle, and that didn't change much when I became homeless myself. I did sleep downtown for three nights during a snow situation in, oh, 2019, I think. On the second night my backpack was stolen, which was probably the most lastingly injurious of the three backpack thefts I experienced while homeless. Thinking about it now, housed again, it occurs to me that services for homeless people are famously concentrated downtown - that's the usual explanation for why there are so many homeless people there - and so the homeless who live downtown are likely to include many of those who most need services. People like me better able (for all my own mental issues) to work within society have little reason to mix with folks like that. So while I don't want to tar all the homeless downtown with one brush - I'm quite certain that's wrong; my best homeless friend, yet another person I haven't seen recently, has lived there - I am willing to grant, to myself as much as to suburbanites, that it makes sense to be scared of many homeless people downtown.
There's a closure notice at the parks department's web page for City Hall Park, saying it was closed from August 13 to October 12. Two months is a whole lot longer than the closures of swept parks in North Seattle, and it was a lot more enforced: fences blocking off everything except a bike path which, like Dilling Way, splits the park. Well, we've seen in North Seattle that the parks department is lazy about cleaning up things like closure notices and caution tape; how much lazier would they be about something as difficult to clean up as a fence? So when I first visited after work on Wednesday, October 27, I figured my job was done as soon as I saw how thorough the fence was:
And, in fact, I've found no evidence that City Hall Park has ever had water fountains or restrooms. The purpose of this particular page, of course, is park appreciation, so I went back to try to appreciate the fenced-off area, but, well, benches and greenswards aren't actually my favourite parts of parks, and fences don't help.
In fact, the security situation prompted
the King County Council to vote to acquire the park from the city,
presumably on the grounds that the Sheriff's office is much more capable
of protecting employees and visitors to the courthouse than the Seattle
Police Department. This vote came one week after October 12. So, joking aside, my guess is that until someone at City Hall decides how to respond to the takeover bid, the fences will stay up.
Just in case anyone from City Hall reads this: Since the law requires that any park land deeded away by the city be replaced by park land elsewhere, part of the issue must be where to site a new park; without some idea of that, the city can't really properly decide whether to agree with the takeover. Since the land is likely to be owned by King County, the city would probably have to choose from a limited selection. Downtown Seattle is not actually especially under-parked; City Hall Park is only the seventh-largest park downtown. In North Seattle, Fremont is an obvious choice, but Lake City an even more obvious one, especially if the new park GETS RESTROOMS. Outside North Seattle, is there any doubt that Georgetown is in most need?
Anyway, dear Diary, you probably won't hear from me before Thursday, so catch up with your blog friends until then, OK? Good night.
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