Dear Diary,
This page's title is something of a "bait and switch". That is, there's only one park in the central, narrowest part of Seattle's downtown. But it's quite a park, and there are two other buildings with public restrooms that also figure in the pages to come. So there's plenty to talk about, and I have enough photos that Blogspot is likely to complain.
Separately, these were my favourite parts of downtown during the years I lived on Capitol Hill, both housed (2006-2012) and homeless (2012-2014). So this page is shaped both by my recent visits to these places, and by layers of my memory; it's much more personal to me than most recent pages in you, dear Diary.
As before, I'm going from smallest to largest. In this case, if one does sufficiently apples to oranges comparisons, that's also south to north, and in addition, the order in which I paid attention to them.
Seattle Central Library
No, that isn't the format in which I've presented the branches of the Seattle Public Library to you, dear Diary. I've never been employed by that library system, and I'm not quite sure, but I think they normally present the name of this library differently from the names of the others, so I've done that, maybe not correctly, here. According to Wikipedia, this library opened in 2004, but there've been open library buildings at this location most of the time since 1906. The land is considerably smaller than the park coming up next; the building is rather larger than that park, though not as large as the building coming last here.
At present, three of this library's floors are open to the public; normally, at least nine of them are. The floors that are open are 1, 3, and 5.
The first floor has the children's area, the non-English-language area (books and DVDs), some seating, perhaps other areas I haven't explored, and also the big check-out, returns, card acquisition, and so forth area up front. It's also where bus schedules are. It has a big open area between the bus schedules, the kids' area, and the front desk, which may be where some events are held.
The second floor has never, to my knowledge, been open to the public.
The third floor has the new books area, the English-language DVDs, the graphic novels, the adult fiction and uncatalogued paperbacks, a number of public-use computers, a fair amount of seating, and the teens' area. Oh, and the Friends of the Library's year-round store. Some more check-out areas, and usually one person from the circulation department. At least one reference librarian, not counting the person who staffs the teens' area. And again, there may be more I'm forgetting or never knew. My main interest in this floor during my poor years 2006-2012, as well as later, was the fiction shelves; also the DVDs, the new book shelves, the uncatalogued paperbacks and, when I was allowed in, the YA fiction shelves and uncatalogued paperbacks. (This last is unrelated to the fact that I briefly had a crush on a YA librarian.) As perhaps you can imagine, dear Diary, I didn't think various bookshelves would be all that photogenic. But also, once I was homeless, I spent relatively little time on this floor. It was popular with the public, who might react badly to my smell; few of its places to sit offered places to plug in my laptops. If I needed to spend time on that floor to read something, I would hide in the northeast corner, as indeed I did yesterday out of habit (and because, with so few floors open, the seating on that floor is more crowded than ever).
The fourth floor has, I think, mainly meeting rooms; I have few memories of it, not, in general, being a meetings kind of person, and also disliking that floor's decor. Its access is separate from the main routes through the library, which is probably how it's closed, and its content - meetings still being considered dangerous, at least for the host in the event of a superspreader, um, event - is probably why it's closed.
The fifth floor has mostly a vast array of public use computers. To the east is an area that used to offer seating, but in recent years has been closed to the public so that volunteer tax preparers can offer their services year-round there. To the north are relatively tech-savvy reference librarians. My memories of this floor are tinged with regret, because for my first six years in Seattle I didn't have home net access, and so often had to go there to reach the Internet and Usenet, dealing with the computers' limitations (at the time, for example, only 1.5 hours per day, and no Firefox; as time went on, also no Notepad and no telnet...) ... well, they aren't entirely happy memories, let's just say. On the other hand, for some strange reason the tech librarians are the keepers of copies of the current Seattle Bike Map.
Most of my homeless memories are of the floors above, which aren't open yet. I could describe them from memory, and I'd probably get some stuff wrong, but not really so very much. But what's the point? In brief, the non-fiction, above all, lives there, as do the newspapers, the CDs (both anglophone and non), more graphic novels, seating far enough apart that I could often use it while homeless, more reference librarians, and on and on. I know the Seattle Room on 9 or 10 is locally famous, but I had little interest in it before I was homeless, and was usually scared to enter such a confined space with my odours after. On the other hand, I prided myself on mastering the Book Spiral.
The Seattle Central Library is famously photogenic, but mostly on the outside. Some of its inside spaces - the talking heads on the escalator between 3 and 5, the soaring ceiling of 5, and, um, the soaring ceilings of and views from 10 - are, I think, probably worth photographing, but I didn't think to do so on my recent visits, just set my face against any library appreciation photos while my favourite places are still unreachable. This is probably churlish of me, considering all that this building has given me over the years, but I still don't have photos to show you, so let's go on, dear Diary.
Jim Ellis Freeway Park
Freeway Park (now named after the guy who made it happen) is the largest single park property downtown. I think it isn't actually the largest single park downtown, but we'll get to why I think that later. Anyway, it's over four times bigger than City Hall Park, which in turn is bigger than Kobe Terrace, so it's by far the largest downtown park I've shown you so far, dear Diary; in North Seattle terms, it's somewhat larger than Wallingford Playfield, but considerably smaller than Loyal Heights Playfield. It opened in 1976. Its extremes are 6th Ave, Spring St, 9th Ave, and Pike St, but it doesn't fill that rectangle. Most famously, it's built largely over Interstate Highway 5, the one whose bridge, further north, reaches North Seattle in Latona. For this, for its designers' fame, and for its own special qualities good and bad, it is perhaps the most nationally or even internationally famous park in Seattle.
I'm pretty sure the only thing I've told you of Freeway Park before this, dear Diary, is that it's one of the perplexing parks I focused on while housed on Capitol Hill, along with Volunteer Park and, in North Seattle, Peace Park, in contrast to Cal Anderson Park, which was too straightforward for me then, but became rather more important to me after I became homeless.
Well, um, perplexing. Yes indeed. Freeway Park is demonically complex. I found several parts of it yesterday that I'd never known existed, and I'm pretty sure I still don't know all its parts, even after reading the long chapter devoted to it in Alison Hirsch's 2005 dissertation, The Fate of Lawrence Halprin's Public Spaces: Three Case Studies. Considering that it crams all these parts into not really all that large a space, and moreover is on several levels, I chose the word "demonically" with intent. Some are set firmly against everything Freeway Park is, and can cite a number of gruesome crimes enabled by its complexity and corresponding areas of privacy. One such person, strangely enough, is Charles Mudede, or at least he was in 2002; he's now the senior writer at The Stranger.
But I've always been, um, carefully fond of it. It was a crossing-light-free route from Capitol Hill to within four lights of the Central Library. Over time I found more reasons. Let me show you.
I still have little love for the northernmost part, if it is a part, the plaza south of the next building. For some bizarre reason the same woman (Angela Danadjieva) who designed Freeway Park rather later designed this plaza adjoining it into as desolate a windswept concrete plaza as I've ever seen.
It does have some redeeming elements - I like the sculpture on its north side:
And there are inscriptions in it. I found two early on, which have gotten harder to see over the years, whether because they're getting worn or because my eyes are, I don't know. One, running across the entrance from Pike St, appears to be in Coast Salish:
The other, near an entrance to Freeway Park more narrowly understood, appears to be from an old land deed. This one I'm pretty sure has really faded, not just become harder for me personally to see.
Also, go back to that first photo for a moment. The designers originally wanted, and for years got, the whole park lit by hundred-foot-tall floodlight posts like the one shown in it. Once the trees grew up and obscured them, well, see Mudede's story. Anyway, that's the first taste I tried to offer here of Freeway Park's weird.
But let's go on. Across the sort of bridge that the deed inscription is on, one reaches the eastern, higher, open area of the park proper. A building there that no longer serves its intended purpose properly has a wall that's been taken over by the Freeway Park Association, a group which Hirsch views darkly, but whose actual activities known to me have mostly been for what I see as the park's good. (Some of the stupider, more philistine, suggestions attached to this group's many names, the ones that led Hirsch to her imprecations, may well have been squelched by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, but regardless, I haven't seen actual philistinism so far.) ANYWAY, on one wall of this building they have a calendar. But, um, yesterday...
Rounding this building's corner, I was delighted to find that my single favourite thing in this park, the annual display in October of kites made by Seattle children, had been extended, presumably by the same agency as had extended October on that calendar. (Note the box to the side of the big calendar. That has littler printed calendars, which were, yesterday, for November.) A few kites, with a November newspaper:
There are many benches in this area, and although Hirsch complains of their being divided to prevent "new homeless" such as me, who first appeared soon after the park opened, from sleeping on them - well, let me just say that in those first two years of homelessness, I found naps possible, though maybe only because I'm so very short. We'll get to another reason to like some of those benches, but here's a photo, though from further south:
South of this plaza, I know these pages are supposed to be about park appreciation, not plumbing, but what if one of the things worth appreciating is plumbing? I've always loved this drinking fountain, and when I was new in town, I was firmly convinced of the myth that it was old enough, horses had had their own bowl. (It is wooden, although I see now that my late-afternoon photo suggests concrete.) I think it was shut down (possibly after I arrived - I have a very implausible memory of drinking from it) because of some infectious agent getting entrenched in it, and vandals have had their way since, but under the right circumstances, it can still be gorgeous:
To the west of this fountain is an underpass, which is pretty much the only shelter the park offers. (According to Hirsch, Halprin wanted a shelter, but his customers didn't.) I'll take this opportunity to note that while Mudede in 2002 wanted his readers afraid of this park's denizens, I've consistently found the homeless of Freeway Park rather less scary than many downtown homeless. (I'll say the opposite of a park a ways ahead still.)
I found a sign in that underpass, and in a few other places around the park:
The sign refers to the Freeway Park Association's current manifesto, their declaration of how they intend to decide how to spend the money allocated to them, which is at an annoying site not under their control, so I haven't read it all yet, but it certainly gives the impression that the Association has, at least for the time being, thoroughly abjured philistinism. Let's hope so.
Anyway, this underpass is, I'm pretty sure, only one of at least two and perhaps more ways to get from the upper, eastern, large area to the lower, western one. Much of the western area is actually on private property; the builder of the building on 6th Ave there agreed to some kind of deal to make it smaller but swankier, and allow part of the park to be built on the area thus saved. I took a random photo of the Christmas lights up too early, but at least in multiple colours:
I'm not, in general, a big fan of the aesthetic of decay, but I think it's entirely appropriate to this park that that big boring red heart has, by the failure of some bulbs, been turned into something much stranger and harder to identify.
Halprin ran the firm that won the contract, partly because he's famously associated with the idea of lidding highways (though a Seattle architect came up with it first), and I assume he exerted some sort of executive authority, but Hirsch, possibly with the polemical purpose of establishing that Halprin's art used to be popular, emphasises the collaborative nature of the work. My guess, however, would be that the big fountains in this western part of the park were more specifically Halprin's work. The Association's website and manifesto offer photos of the fountains running, but I can only offer ones of them dead. The Cascade fountain was made for children to play in, and still offers what's probably the original obligatory warning:
The Canyon fountain further east is less participatory; one may only walk through it along a well-defined path, which takes one pretty easily to the Easter egg Halprin put into it, a window through which one can watch the traffic on I-5. Unfortunately, most of the window is scutched up, I think mainly with decades of exhaust, perhaps also with graffiti, so I was only able to glimpse the traffic, and evidently failed in three tries to catch any of it.
Much of what gets me tentatively approving of the Association is that they want to get those fountains running again; now they only run, way below full strength, on special occasions.
Another thing to like about the concrete-floored west plaza, with the kitschy primary-coloured tables and chairs on which people sit when Association-sponsored events happen, is that it's where the Friends of the Library run an extension of their bookshop, summers only. Here's one of the carts, parked for the winter.
Unfortunately they can only staff it for a couple of hours per day, weekday lunchtimes; since that didn't usually coincide with my visits to the library, I rarely found it open. But I did get there The Silent Governess by Julie Klassen, which I think was the first work of specifically Christian fiction I actually liked. (I liked even more her previous, first, books, The Lady of Milkweed Manor and The Apothecary's Daughter; the later ones turned out to get progressively more ordinary, at least as far as I read, which I think is The Painter's Daughter.)
One of the areas I was unfamiliar with in Freeway Park is everything south of Seneca Street, which was where I thought the park ended. I can thank Hirsch for correcting that mistake of mine. Yes, Seneca divides Freeway Park, as does an I-5 exit. Here's one more fountain, but not by Halprin (any more than I think Halprin made the wooden drinking fountain), but by Seattle's George Tsutakawa:
And oops, now I've gone from north to south through the park, when I was trying to go south to north in this page! Well, we'll hurry back to that dead concrete plaza, but on the way, while I'm not talking about plumbing in these pages, that needn't get me to ignore all mundane amenities, and here's one more photo of a Freeway Park bench:
Do you see that tiny green light shining from its end, dear Diary? That's the sign that one can charge things from that bench. Not all the benches offer this, and when I was homeless in those parts, most of the ones that did, didn't work. Hence my years-ago trip to Occidental Square. But I saw two or three such lights on yesterday's visit. Is this another Association improvement, or someone else's work? I don't know, but I'm glad at least one recent change in Freeway Park is clearly more to the benefit of homeless people than of anyone else.
Next, a sadder story. I'm pettishly peeved at the library, but have no real complaints; you've seen how much I really did enjoy Freeway Park and how hopeful I actually am; but up ahead, something that ended worse.
The Washington State Trade and Convention Center
The Washington State Convention Center, as their name apparently officially now is, is a taxing authority, and therefore public, not a private company, but as seen by this homeless man, it was private. The story was that for permission to build the building the way they wanted, they made a deal to offer public amenities. They confirm this in a plaque laying claim to the plaza south of the building (not realising how embarrassing it really is, to say that that plaza is the best one can do in providing public amenities). This was also the explanation I heard for seating areas on the first, second, and fourth floors (though most of these also serve the retail businesses the WSCC has as tenants), for occasionally accessible Wi-Fi, and for other amenities I'm trying not to talk about here.
One of my temp jobs in my early years in Seattle, sometime between 2006 and 2008, was at the Convention Center; for some reason they needed extra people for some particular event, to set up and take down rooms. I have no other inside knowledge. I met a man while doing that job who seemed likely to become my first real friend in Seattle, until we disagreed sharply about ethical responses to witnessing violence.
Once I was homeless, I found that it opened earlier than the library, so on days I was going to that library from the places on Broadway where I slept or from my storage on 12th, it was a great place to eat breakfast after doing stuff these pages aren't supposed to mention. I was firmly wedded to a small area on the 2nd floor that has tables that stretched my memory of flags and ability to identify languages:
That area has triple trash - recycling, compost and landfill - and one of the things I did, trying to "pay rent" for being there, was put things in, and sometimes move things to, the correct bin. This was also one way of getting newspapers; another was that sometimes the employed people who had their breakfasts there left their papers behind, on their tables.
Here's another view (which turns out to have caught those trash cans at the far right):
One amenity the building did not provide was electricity. With complete impartiality the security guys would stop homeless people, commuters, or conventioneers from charging anything at the outlets in the middle of that area's floor. (The rule against sleeping there, in practice, fell mainly against the homeless, but I have seen drunk conventioneers woken up too.)
The walls of the 2nd floor were usually filled with art works with some local connection, often representing this or that association of painters, or competition, or something like that. On occasion, some of the art had something to do with science fiction or fantasy, and I would inform a relevant Usenet newsgroup. Unfortunately, the art displays haven't yet revived, possibly because the conventions that might result in those artworks selling haven't either.
I was never interested in the public seating on the 1st floor - uncomfortable chairs, drafty location, and way too many people walking through. But there's an interesting fountain on the way in:
There's a much larger seating area south of the one I liked, with more ordinary tables but the same comfortable chairs. It hosts Juicy Cafe, whose employees sometimes gave homeless people the leftovers when they closed up shop, and its walls have a very weird conceptual art piece on which I spent way too much time:
When I sat in that area, out of gratitude for the occasional food from Juicy and for the Convention Center as a whole, I almost always only sat on the concrete ledges around its sides, not at the tables.
The third floor is supposed to be off-limits to the public. Unfortunately, since it's where the building's permanent art collection is, it's currently got the most interesting hallways to wander.
I rarely used the 4th floor seating area, which is buried behind various parts of the setup for welcoming guests to the conventioneers-only parts of the building. People tended to stay a long time there, and the tables were a bit too close together for my comfort. (There's also a public seating area right in front of the shops on that floor, but to me it was always obvious that I should keep out of there, and I didn't want the company of homeless people or just troublemakers who didn't share my scruples.) What started me taking these photos yesterday, unfortunately, was the discovery that the secluded area is now roped off; I don't know whether that's because of something COVID-related, or an intentional change for the long term.
The story of how I lost any desire to visit the Convention Center, for years until this series, has to wait for the main series to which this one is merely a prologue. Good night, dear Diary.
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