Dear Diary,
From downtown this evening I went to Fred Meyer in Ballard, the only other errand I'd left myself time to run today before tomorrow's hiking. I'd mis-remembered an article in Publicola as implying that both the RVs adjacent to Green Lake Park, and the campers in Woodland Park, were to be swept soon. This is not true; the article in fact specifically says the campers have until January. But anyway,
Oh, dear, dear Diary. I've even told the city (in the form of the Seattle Public Library) my adress, but haven't told you. I live on NE 64th St between Ravenna Boulevard and Green Lake Park. So I figured I could walk home from Ballard, and look into Woodland Park on the way. And from there, Gilman wasn't much of a stretch.
Gilman Playground
The restrooms, of course, remain closed - no park restrooms in southern Ballard stay open in winter. (Ross Park's restrooms have to close in cold weather. Gilman Playground's don't have to, but ought to close, so homeless people lose an alternative, because human Number Two is such an excellent decoration for Ballard's streets. And Ballard Playground's restrooms don't at all have to close, they're in a much bigger building for crying out loud, but there's no way the people who live near there want their neighbourhood to have the only open park restrooms in Ballard.)
Anyway, the real news is that the water fountain, which had consistently run ever since my first visit in June 2020, even that winter, was off.
Well, I guess it deserved a rest after all that time, but I was a little shocked and more than a little disappointed to find that. I didn't take any photos there.
Woodland Park
This was a pretty focused visit; I visited the three restroom buildings in the western, upper, part of "Lower" Woodland Park, and some of the water fountains in that area.
I found the men's room of the "50th St" restrooms open at 7:40 P.M., the women's room closed, according to the sign due to a "malfunction or freeze". The nearby water fountain, though considerably repaired before the last time I'd seen it, wasn't running then, so I wasn't in the least surprised that it wasn't running tonight, as nightly lows head towards the point when most water fountains really need to be shut down. (Hing Hay Park's water fountain has been shut off for nearly a week, although the one in "lower" Ravenna Park was still running Friday night.)
So, um, I was pretty unprepared for this:
That's one of the two fountains attached to the "Pink Palace" building in the centre-west of "Lower" Woodland Park. As with most of the fountains I've found running lately (Magnuson, Ravenna, Bitter Lake, not so much downtown), its drain is blocked with sand, but it's exuberantly running. Now, I've argued, as long ago as November 2020, that water fountains attached to heated restroom buildings are, based on Jackson Park's experience, good choices to keep on in winter. I haven't noticed Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation paying much attention to that argument, though, and based on what I found tonight in Gilman, here, and at Green Lake, I strongly suspect the fountains still running at this point are simply those near remaining homeless encampments in or near the parks. (Ravenna is a counter-argument, but its fountains' harder water may give them a bit more leeway with cold.)
The rest of the social contract that seems to me to have existed between the campers and the parks staff at Woodland Park has survived, so far, to varying degrees. I checked all the shelters, something I've previously had trouble doing at night, but tonight a full moon helped, and so did Christmas lights at three of the shelters, including two in the southern area where I hadn't previously seen good evidence of electricity at all. All remain occupied except for shelter 7, where I'm profoundly disappointed to have to report that only one bench remains; all the other benches and tables are gone, presumably for use as firewood. I found not only electrical cables, but also water hoses, running across a street in the north of the park from shelter 6.
Where the social contract has most obviously broken down, besides the stolen furniture, is in trash handling. Lots of bags haven't been picked up. Possibly in reaction to that, lots of trash is now there unbagged, including at the presumably former pick-up stop adjacent to that water fountain whose photo I showed you, dear Diary, pages and pages ago. There are two water fountains there, adjacent, but the one on the right, nearer in this photo, though also running, has a small bag in its bowl.
But actually, the program that supplies trash removal to encampments includes supplying bags, so I'm guessing both removal and bags are no longer available. One of the best things mayor Jenny Durkan ever did for homeless people was to ramp that program way, way up early in the lockdown, and then the City Council doubled her request for its 2021 budget. So maybe this is just a blip, depleted funds, and come New Year's Day garbage removal at Woodland Park will resume, and the campers will have a lot of tidying to do. Or maybe, since their sweep is planned for January, nobody will bother. Dunno.
Anyway, I also found the fountain running at shelter 6, which had not been running the last time I visited, in, um, October. So what the heck is going on here? My guess is that parks staff are continuing to bend over backwards to be nice to the Woodland Park campers, even with them the most likely suspects in the denudation of shelter 7, and the trash problem is just the blip I speculate about above. Maybe the parks people are aware that the tiny house village spots that had been planned for the campers have gone elsewhere, so the campers probably face a pretty bleak future after January, the past eighteen or so months probably the best of the homeless parts of their lives, and parks employees are being models of forbearance in the meantime. But anyway, after I tell you, dear Diary, that I found the "Pink Palace" men's room open but the women's, and both "lawn bowling" ones, closed, and that all the door shots are at the Google Drive folder, that's it for Woodland Park.
Except that I still hadn't found a single sweep notice. I've recently seen a sweep near where I work, and although nobody played entirely fair there, still, there was a notice, and it wasn't hard to find. So why not at Woodland? Because I got the date wrong, of course, but the point is, then I went on to Green Lake Park to look for the notice there (as well as because it was on my way home, of course).
Green Lake Park
Of course, what that Publicola article actually said was that only those camping along West Green Lake Way N are to be swept. And they did get a notice, but it took a strange form.
For me, this is fitting. My mother was widowed when I was 8, and I went through high school young, from 11 to 15. So she refused to let me take driver's ed, because it would send her auto insurance rates skyrocketing, and I'd never been able to afford it, time and money at the same time, since. As a result, I'm one of the few Americans for whom "gas" and "parking" don't have similar visceral resonance to, say, "electricity" and "phone". I can intellectually understand when people say the vehicular homeless have huge extra worries, specifically gas and parking, but it just basically doesn't make sense to me. So of course, given that I don't understand them, I'd expect their sweeps to take a different form. And that they do:
Ho ho ho! Happy Christmas!
That notice includes a URL which the Seattle Department of Transportation, which posted it, says explains about "temporary no parking zones". This it does. Temporary no parking zones are things private companies and individuals normally pay SDOT for permission to impose, and that's all well explained, and indeed mapped, at that site. But zones imposed by SDOT itself for sweeping purposes? The site certainly does not enable one to find those (not even through the map's GIS features). The particular temporary no parking zone of interest here isn't even on the map yet:
SDOT seems determined to play the Grinch this year.
Mind, the Publicola report also refers to tents in Green Lake Park near all those vehicles, and I did see some tonight, and even exchange greetings with a resident. So does "No Parking" cover them, too? Or where is their sweep notice?
I certainly didn't find it at the Green Lake Small Craft Center, where the restrooms were open (well, it wasn't 9 P.M. yet). The restrooms were also open at the "65th St" location, as they should be. The latter has no water fountains, but those at the Small Craft Center were running. These, too, are attached to buildings that are presumably heated all winter, so again, they fit my advocacy. Problem is, the Woodland Park shelter 6 water fountain is free-standing, and if that shelter were heated, well, shelter 7 would still have its furniture. So I think the water fountains still running in Woodland and Green Lake Parks are still running, not because, in a normal Seattle winter, they can safely run most of the time (as Gilman Playground's free-standing fountain showed last winter, when there were homeless in that place), but just only because the parks department is trying to be nice to the campers.
Which is certainly a happier thing to close on than what SDOT is preparing to do to the campers' more mobile peers.
Good night, dear Diary. Tomorrow, I hope to hike the parks of northeastern downtown, and finish that series at last, except for the artist credits.
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