More on Amazon's South of Denny Parks

Dear Diary,

Surprise!  I went hiking this evening, which cascaded into doing a bunch of chores late, so in the end all my writing in you tonight will not only eat into quiet time, but also into my sleep.  Sorry, but this is bad news for me.

Anyway. the point of these hikes was threefold:  I wanted to try to get a photo of Amazon's "Day 1 Field" (if that's really what anyone outside Open Street Map calls it); I wanted to photograph the seventeenth place that I hadn't visited yesterday, which I now have no hope of telling you about tonight; and I wanted to photograph a park I do still hope to tell you about tonight, of which, it turned out, I didn't have remotely as many months-old photos as I'd thought.

Well, the see-saws were considerably less popular than yesterday, so I did manage to get a photo:

And by the way, I'm now pretty sure "Day 1 Field"'s turf is artificial.

Anyway, walking away from there, I decided to explore the parkish area I'd mentioned on the other side of 7th Ave, between Blanchard and Bell Streets.  This turned out to be rather bigger than Open Street Map had led me to believe, and also turned out definitely to be a separate Amazon park from the one I wrote about yesterday (and above).  For one thing, it has its own dog off-leash area, as postage-stamp-sized as the one in that park.  For another, it has signs I didn't notice in that other park:

In case the print is too fine for you, dear Diary, what they say, in essence, is that behaviour in general, and political behaviour in particular, in this park is OK as long as it doesn't "unreasonably interfere" with others, and in particular with whatever Amazon employees need to do.  This got my attention because so many businesses explicitly bar signature gathering, my usual Safeway of not long ago closed early one day for fear of a protest march ...  I'm aware that there are many reasons to doubt Amazon's fundamental morality, and have voiced some myself in my years-ago AMA on Reddit.  But if we don't notice when businesses of any kind behave better than the norm, what incentive do they have to do so?  And these signs amount to Amazon, of all companies, behaving better than the norm.  So, um, one cheer, anyway, for Amazon.

(And at least a half-cheer more for one implication of that sign:  The sheltered parts of this park, that led me to misjudge its size on Open Street Map - would they really be OK for homeless people to sleep in?  I'll have to come later some night and see.  Mind, I do mean sleep, as in sleeping bags, rolled back up in the morning; tents would obviously "interfere".)

In the background of the photo nearer above is the dullest of the interactive electronic artworks I've encountered at the three Amazon parks I've visited in the past two days, which it seems obviously to have laid on for the holidays.  The one described yesterday, the see-saw, really does seem to deserve the enthusiasm with which people greet it.   The one in the park I still hope to describe tonight, um, doesn't, but it's still interactive in principle.  For this politically semi-free park kitty-corner from the one next to the Spheres, though, Amazon got big glowing pseudo-icicles that change colours, to produce a "kaleidoscopic" effect.  Well, maybe by daylight, of which we have so very much in Seattle in December.  I didn't notice anything of the sort by the rather bright artificial light of night-time.  So OK, now I'm stuck, having photographed the thing, with going back and getting the artist's or artists' name(s) and the title, but anyway, at night, it's dull.  Whereas the see-saws' population tripled just while I was trying to set up to take a photo, which is why the one up top isn't as panoramic as it could've been thirty seconds earlier.

These results from visiting two Amazon between-buildings parklets lead me to think that the third, bounded by 7th and 8th Avenues and Blanchard and Lenora Streets, would probably be worth seeing up closer than the across-the-street view I got yesterday.  Maybe when I go back for the prism artist name(s).

Anyway, it's time to get on with the parks of the central group, which will probably take me, alas, a while to write about.  Until then, dear Diary, happy minutes.