The Parks of Downtown Seattle, part VC: Northwest (two more places)

Dear Diary,

Today I visited the remaining places I didn't reach last weekend, of the nine I'd found by consulting OpenStreetMap, and the 2020 and 2021 Real Property Reports of the City of Seattle, within the parts of downtown I'd already covered in this series of pages.

The other seven, for anyone confused by the previous page, were 1) the Seattle Department of Transportation portion of the Elliott Bay Trail, two more localised SDOT parks - 2) the Washington St Boat Dock and 3) the Habitat Bench on Seattle Waterfront - 4) the Goat Hill P-Patch, 5) the areas that I ended up telling you, dear Diary, about as the other two thirds of Goat Hill, 6) Waterfall Garden Park, and 7) to be named probably next weekend, because I didn't get back there yet to take photos by daylight.

A site from my tax preparation past came to mind all of a sudden as I was dithering over the ownership of many places on Open Street Map:  the King County Parcel Viewer.  So I can now tell you, dear Diary, that King County considers itself the owner of the P-Patch part of Goat Hill and of the tree-dominated area southeast of it (bundling both in with the Goat Hill Parking Garage between them), but expresses no opinion as to the ownership of the grassy area across 6th St from the latter.  My strong impression from looking at other places on the Parcel Viewer is that when King County expresses no opinion like that for land within Seattle, the City of Seattle is usually the owner, and in the two pages I hope to write tonight, I'm going with that assumption.

Anyway.  So I hope to write part IVB, Central (one more place), next weekend, as well as part VII, Northeast, but for now can write parts VC and VI, North-Central.

(City of Seattle) West Mercer Stairs Park

This is Open Street Map's name for a place I'm pretty sure SDOT simply considers an undeveloped street.  There's a part of W Mercer St that runs to a little past 5th Ave W, and there's a part that runs from 6th Ave W to Elliott Way W.  Between those is a steep hill, with a stair on its south side allowing people who can deal with stairs to walk between these two streets.  The rest of the hill, however, looks like this:

It's mildly worth visiting, should one's path bring one to that neighbourhood.  It's a much more impressive solution to the problem posed by that hill than I saw at a private building further south:

(Private) Elliott Bay Office Park

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation rented, as of the 2020 report, office space in two more or less downtownish buildings.  I'll get to the other one, which is on the south side of S Dearborn St, in a future series of pages, but this one is well south of W Mercer St.  It's got grass and art in front of it, so it's a reasonably worthy place for the parks department:

But of course since today isn't a weekday, I couldn't go in and find out whether their actual offices face that area, let alone the parks (Myrtle Edwards and Centennial) beyond.

Well, dear Diary, as soon as I've gone and gotten my Sunday hike reward, a meal from the restaurant, O'Ginger Bistro, that helped save my life on a Sunday hike that went grievously wrong last winter while I was still homeless - anyway, as soon as I've done that, I'll start to write page VI of this series, about the parks of Belltown and about Seattle Center.  Until then, a happy hour or two.