The Parks of Downtown Seattle, part VIA: North-Central (smaller places)

Dear Diary,

I'm back, and ready to write about the parks of Belltown and about Seattle Center.

In writing the catch-up pages, the last few, I've gotten out of the habit, but since this page and part VII shouldn't need any catch-up pages, I'm going back to writing from smallest to largest.  Since both pages include several private parks and similar things that I haven't found in Seattle's real property reports, this is taking some guesswork on my part.

(City of Seattle) Al Rochester's Podium

This is a small area with benches where 4th Ave meets Denny Way.  More precisely, it's the oddly shaped polygon made by Clay St, 4th Ave in the direction it goes north of Clay, the line 4th Ave follows up to Clay, and Denny.  It's pretty certainly the smallest more or less public, more or less park-like, area I found in north-central downtown Seattle.

Since I remember walking along Denny as consistently exhausting, I can only applaud anything that puts more benches along that street.  I'm also amused by my own reactions to the guy it's named after.

(The plaque, that is, was donated by family members, and for all I know the benches; the land was the city's to start with.)  Al Rochester seems to have been the kind of politician everybody liked, which in my experience means the kind who doesn't get much done, but he also seems to have spearheaded the World's Fair that created Seattle Center.  So what do I know, dear Diary?

(SDOT) Tilikum Place

Tilikum Place is a typical Seattle Department of Transportation downtown park:  a triangle with brick paving, a bus stop, some sculpture.  However, it also has benches, which makes a big difference; people other than commuters want to spend time there, sometimes.  Though maybe not on a rainy Sunday in December:

Oh, and it has trees, which probably provide shade in summer.  Tilikum Place is probably my favourite among the parks of Belltown, not that that's saying much, as we'll see.  It's another of the SDOT parks that has its own Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation web page, and a rather entertaining page it is, too, mainly about this sculpture:

The sculpture doesn't greatly impress me as art, but as an image of an American Indian leader rather than a settler one, I'll take what I can get.

This is one of several parks in this page which I visited on November 21 with a friend, not long after telling you, dear Diary, that I hoped not always to hike alone for you.  It was a very pleasant afternoon, though few photos resulted.

Tilikum Place is also on Denny, between Cedar St, the line Cedar St takes until it reaches that spot, and 5th Ave.

Belltown Community Center

Yes, "No Public Restrooms".  Yes, the particular private business now resident where the 2020 real property report incorrectly claims the city still had a lease had reason to put that sign up.  The Belltown Community Center was promised voters in a 1999 vote, but the resulting money wasn't actually enough to buy real estate in Belltown.  So the parks department gave up and leased a space, which opened in 2012.  The lease ran for seven years, turned out something of a boondoggle, and wasn't renewed after 2018.  So, more or less, says an exceptionally detailed and informative blog post by your old, um, frenemy, dear Diary, Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for the parks department.

I'd imagined it would've gotten a lot of visits from poor people who'd finished their business at the DSHS office nearby, but apparently it actually wasn't popular much at all.  Still, my friend, who is not poor and who lives in Belltown, was as disappointed to see that sign on November 21 as I'd been a week earlier, and it introduces both the series of parks on Bell St (the BCC was at 5th Ave & Bell), and this page's theme.

The private business is a "Dashmart", apparently one of those "dark grocery stores" we kept hearing about early in the pandemic, but this one owned not by a grocery chain (whose workers probably would be unionised) but by the delivery business Doordash (whose workers probably wouldn't be unionised).  Ironically, the people I saw today picking up or dropping off items looked, by and large, about as poor as I'd imagined the users of the Belltown Community Center to be.

(?Port of Seattle) Unnamed parklet

According to the King County Parcel Viewer, the Port owns the building this small space (which I found through Open Street Map) seems to be attached to, which it calls the Viewpoint Building, and in the past called World Trade Center North.  It's basically a paved space between the two buildings that share the block between Elliott Ave, Wall St, Bell St, and the railroad.  It could've been the Battery St Street End, but that's actually on the shoreline one block southwest and down.  It looks like this:

So basically, it has seating (I think) at the far end, a view in the same place, and a basketball hoop.  It's about as good as Belltown parks get, unfortunately.  It has a gate structure, but no actual gate within it.  However, the stack in the distance before the view, in the photo above, includes that gate and a whole bunch of similar panels, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find this little parklet fenced a year, maybe even a month, from now.

(Private) The Fourth & Blanchard Building's Courtyard

One building in Belltown has a huge front yard, complexly and interestingly landscaped.  It seems to have noticed this space becoming popular with people from outside the building; on all sides, what would seem to have started as entrances have been fairly permanently walled with materials that probably were more or less ready at hand.  Well, all that is the owners' and even the tenants' right.

But one element of that courtyard is a sculpture, and while the woman that sculpture depicts may not be intended as homeless, she's certainly intended as tired:

And it is just rude to taunt that sculpted woman, who has no choice but to rest indefinitely, with a "No Loitering" sign:

Regrade Park

This is the second of the three Bell St parks, occupying a little more than a quarter-acre at the southwest (actually south) corner of 3rd Ave & Bell.  It is the third-biggest parks department park in Belltown.  And...

in 2005 the entire park was turned into the fourth-smallest off-leash area for dogs in Seattle.  All that from this 2017 report, a 194-page PDF, which informed me that there's an organised group in Seattle who take care of most of the existing off-leash areas and push for the creation of more.  Their "biennial report" is the most interesting part of the document, pages 94-114 (going by the numbers on the bottoms of the pages).

As you can see, dear Diary, it's a much more attractive off-leash area than the one I've shown you in Magnuson Park.  It has actual colour.  It has trees.

But I'm pretty sure Regrade Park is a place where dogs, perhaps, can recharge their souls, but people are likely to find that rather more difficult.

Belltown Cottage Park

Quite a few people probably can recharge their souls more or less easily at this next park, the largest real park in Belltown, which is on the southeast (actually east) corner of Elliott Ave and Vine St.  Probably two or three dozen people, total.  For everyone else, soul-recharging takes some rule-following, some consideration, and some luck, at the very least.

This park is split down the middle.  The parks department owns the whole thing, but accounts for it as two properties in the real property report:  "Belltown Cottages" and "Belltown Ppatch", respectively 7,216 and 7,214 square feet.

This was the only place my friend and I reached early enough to photograph on November 21.  In the P-patch half, it's easy to take pictures.  And yes, it's a real P-patch:

It was opened in 1995, and obviously a lot of loving work went into it; notice the beauty given to the stairs up to it:

The Cottage half is rather harder for me to photograph, because unlike Hubbard Homestead, the cottages of Belltown Cottage Park aren't lost to history.  They're actual homes in which actual people live.  There are three, though usually only two at a time are occupied, and they have one small back yard that the general public is supposed to believe (but not really believe) is actually a public park.

I don't know how long they've been specifically the homes of writers in residence at Richard Hugo House, which is on 11th Ave on Capitol Hill, maybe a mile away uphill, but the program goes back to 1999.

I only stopped briefly there today, struck by something I hadn't noticed on previous visits.  Like most P-patches, this one has a fence and a gate:

 

(City of Seattle) Unnamed possible park

I was ready, today, to declare that Bell St isn't really where the parks of Belltown are, that unofficial private parks on Battery St were the neighbourhood's real gathering places.  But no, the only person I saw at the Port of Seattle parklet was one guy shooting hoops (who kindly backed away long enough for me to photograph the area).  And Seattle doesn't want anyone at all at this next property, which could be Belltown's biggest park.

Yep, another hill.  This one wraps around a parking garage at the corner, which is city-owned; the Parcel Viewer sees the garage as a taxable property, but not this area, but I'd bet it's city-owned too.  As if the fence weren't enough, the city has signs here too:

In case any of your reader don't recognise this kind of sign, dear Diary, it's headlined "No camping in emphasis area".  In other words, while being homeless anywhere in Seattle is essentially illegal, involves trespassing either on private or on public property, "emphasis areas" are places where the city really doesn't want anyone camping.

I can't believe it takes a non-parks department staffer to state the obvious here, but has it occurred to the city that it could build a Belltown Community Center at the top of the hill and a Belltown Playground at the bottom, and deter campers that way?  Instead of just setting up the same tired refrain, "We can't have anything nice because then homeless people would wreck it."  Which is the message communicated by that fence and that sign.

How much of Freeway Park have we wrecked?  How much damage did my sleeping in Kirke Park, Soundview Playfield, Sandel Playground, and Green Lake Park, among others, when hiking for you, dear Diary, do to the enjoyment of housed Seattleites?  I'm particularly irked by the repetition of this meme in Belltown because it isn't the homeless who've taken the parks away from Belltown.

It isn't big companies, either.  One of your themes, dear Diary, all along, has been the public and the private.  The bet on which I started you was that mayor Jenny Durkan was right to say that we homeless should, during the lockdowns, rely on public park restrooms rather than, in my case, the more convenient ones at the private University Village shopping mall.  I wrote a whole page about the difficulty in doing so when private restrooms were reliable and public ones weren't, in your earliest days, and a few weeks later wrote what I then thought was the beginning of your conclusion on the same topic.  It's easy to think that "the private" always has to be business.

But in Belltown, "the private" is neither business, nor inconsiderate homeless campers.  It's gardeners, and it's a writing program, and it's dog keepers.  And it's the scaredy-cats at the City, and perhaps soon at the Port, who put fences around what Belltown needs.

There are two main complaints about homeless campers in parks and for that matter everywhere.  One is that we're scary to many people.  I don't see what homeless people are supposed to do about that.  It's not as though I suddenly turned from a mild-mannered office clerk into an axe murderer when I became homeless, nor is it especially surprising that I'm now again a mild-mannered office clerk.  Actually, I was a mild-mannered office clerk while homeless, working as a tax preparer, submitting suggested changes to library classifications.  It's not my fault that I nevertheless scared people.

But the other complaint about homeless people is more serious.  We take away public geography and turn it private.  There essentially isn't any other way to exist while homeless, that doesn't involve that.

What lesson, then, do the parks of Belltown, where any number of housed people have made public geography private, teach the conscientious homeless man?

In the remaining two places in Seattle's north-central downtown that I intend to tell you about, dear Diary, the issue of public and private comes up again, as it will in northeastern downtown, where there are new and serious private parks.  But I'm used to thinking that Blogspot doesn't want quite so many photos in one page - it certainly didn't when I wrote your pages on my phone - and anyway, the parks I just discussed pose this theme of the public and the private more sharply than the ones remaining in north-central downtown do.  So yet again, I'm splitting this page, and that'll probably happen with part VII too, because there are lots of parks in northeastern downtown Seattle.

Until the next page, then, dear Diary, happy minutes.