Dear Diary,
I decided to split the northwest group of parks in two. First of all because the parks in each half are linked by different things, and second because these parks are significantly smaller and less appreciable, in this series devoted to park appreciation, than the parks in the second page, so I wanted that second page not to have to include this page's photos along with its own, and thus run up against a Blogspot limit.
This page's parks are linked by being associated with the part of Seattle's waterfront that is seen as a recreational destination by tourists, local people who want to spend money, and so on: they're near Pike Place Market, the Great Wheel, and many other businesses. Several are also linked by being located on nearly consecutive piers - wooden constructions out over the water, which, dear Diary, along Seattle's broadly downtownish waterfront, are numbered. (HistoryLink has a much more detailed account, though not maps like the first site linked.)
There are several barriers between this part of downtown and the rest. It is, being the waterfront, physically lower than most of downtown, so it's downhill to get there and uphill to leave, just like the street ends throughout Seattle and Seaview Ave, Golden Gardens Park, and so on in North Seattle. Also, Alaskan Way is a very wide street, along which lots of people drive, and one has to cross it to get from downtown in general to most of these parks. I think the railroads no longer traverse the parts of their tracks that also lie between most of downtown and the shore, but, well, I've been wrong about railroads before.
But since there's a lot of money involved in offering Seattle's people and tourists a taste of this part of the waterfront, there are also lots of efforts to solve these problems, minimise these barriers. Starting with the smallest and, therefore, first of the parks in this page.
Pike Street Hillclimb
The Pike Street Hillclimb is, like the Wallingford Steps, a series of stairways designated as a park by the Seattle Department of Transportation. I'm inclined to agree with the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation that SDOT is smoking something with regard to this one; the Pike Street Hillclimb has none of the greenery and none of the art that make the Wallingford Steps (also owned by SDOT) an exceptionally nice way to go up and down, a minor destination in its own right, and worthy of a page in its honour at the parks department website. (In other words, dear Diary, the Pike Street Hillclimb does not have, nor deserve, such a page.)
It does, on the other hand, bridge all the barriers between upper Pike St and the one block of lower Pike St that ends with an actual traffic light enabling crossing Alaskan Way. (If one crosses that light, one finds oneself at Pier 59.) It is, therefore, very popular, in the limited sense that lots of people use it; and since those people are pedestrians, I guess I'm not surprised that SDOT, whose usual concern is with drivers, thinks of it as parkish. I traversed all of it on the Saturday night of October 30, when Halloween was being celebrated a day early, but since it didn't have any plumbing, had no interest in taking photos. When I came back on Saturday, November 6 to photograph these parks by day, I'd approached from the south instead, and I had so much trouble photographing the lowest staircase without highlighting a bunch of people that I didn't bother to visit any higher part of it.
Victor Steinbrueck Park
This is the least waterfronty park in this page; it runs for about half a block along the west side of Western Ave, north and south of Virginia St. I included it here, while excluding some Belltown parks equally near the waterfront further north, partly because Victor Steinbrueck Park has, and is indeed dominated by, views of the water, which those don't and aren't, and partly because it's right next to Pike Place Market, just north of it. It's nearly as far north as piers 64 and 65 used to be. It opened in 1970, but wasn't named after Victor Steinbrueck (a leader of the fight to preserve Pike Place Market) until he died in 1985.
This is the only park in this page with which I have a history, and that history is that this park taught me to fear the homeless of Seattle's downtown. The temporary agency branch from which I got most of my work from 2006 to 2010 was located across the street from it, so when I went there to pick up my paychecks, I often wandered nearby. There was often someone having what is nowadays delicately called "a mental health crisis" while I was there - not always, but, say, half the time? There were usually the kinds of crusty old homeless men I've usually avoided ever since, even as recently as a year ago when I was halfway to becoming an old homeless man myself. There were sometimes disturbingly forward, and visibly mentally ill, homeless women. It was very much not my scene, even though I'd previously been homeless for a few months of 2003 in Madison, Wisconsin, and was from 2006 to 2012 living in an SRO, as I had previously 1997-1998 and 2004-2006. (Many people who consider themselves allies of the homeless are horrified by SROs, seeing them as a form of homelessness. This kind of squeamishness is something I, as a homeless man, could've done without in allies. Just as the homeless of Victor Steinbrueck Park could probably do without my advocacy.) I mentioned in my description of Freeway Park that I feared its homeless less than most downtown homeless, and mentioned then that another park was coming where I had the opposite reaction. This is that park.
So I'm pretty surprised I could put away my fears enough to take three photos to show appreciation of this park that I don't really feel. (It may help that it was, after all, a decade later, and some of the stuff that attracted the homeless in those years is now gone, so some of the scary people are too.) Victor Steinbrueck Park is basically a big grassy mound surrounded by stone berms that serve as the benches on which many of the people just described might sit, as also might, of course, people I felt I had more in common with fifteen years ago. Grass is in short supply in the parks of downtown Seattle - Kobe Terrace, Freeway Park, City Hall Park as was, and we'll get to a few more - so it has that going for it. And, of course, being a downtown park, it has some art:
Piers 62 and 63
This is basically a big not quite empty wooden plaza right now, having opened fairly recently; it's opposite the end of Pine St. The parks department web page, referring only to Pier 62 (I think Pier 63 is not yet built, maybe cancelled), calls it a "preview" of "the full Waterfront Park". I just spent a few minutes clicking through pieces of planned or hoped for waterfront construction, all of which struck me as more than a little parkish, and I have no idea which exact parts will be in the planned Waterfront Park and which won't. Unfortunately for the planners, Pier 62, which one of those plans says historically used to host concerts and such, and which the parks department page says should do so again, hasn't been able to reach its full swing yet because of the epidemic.
I took several photos at Pier 62, but only one pier-scape, if you will, dear Diary:
Waterfront Park
Waterfront Park as was, was one of the largest parks in downtown Seattle. It was essentially Pier 58, which was apparently huge, and which was at the end of Union St. For a sense of its full glory, here's the Internet Archive with a 2018 version of its parks department web page. Apparently, though, it wasn't built in 1974 to last as well as it needed; as a result, it fell apart during 2020, as described in a very helpful Seattle Met story by Annette Maxon.
Now, it's nothing but views, of which I took three, but, well, they weren't ideal view-photography circumstances and you know, dear Diary, that I'm an indifferent photographer at best. So I'll only subject you to one:
Waterfront Park as it's planned to be should be 20 acres, making it enormously the biggest park in downtown Seattle, but should extend from Pioneer Square all the way to Pier 62, which stretches that size down so much, I don't know what they'll be able to fit into it. In particular, though, Pier 58 is supposed to come back.
Seattle Aquarium
I was quite surprised to learn that the Seattle Aquarium, which is on Piers 59 and 60, is a parks department property; but so it is. It's also very expensive, considerably more so than the Woodland Park Zoo. So while I realise the whole point of this page, as of others in this particular series, is park appreciation, before I even get to the question of restrooms, I had no interest in appreciating this particular park, after I saw one of the signs in this photo:
Yep, "No Public Restrooms", just as if this institution were some two-bit restaurant.
I promise, dear Diary, to be much more appreciative of the parks in the next half of this page, which I should be able to tell you about tomorrow. Until then, good night and good day.
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