The Parks of Downtown Seattle, part VIB: North-Central (the biggest places)

Dear Diary,

Whew, one more page and I'll be done with today's hikes.  And this one is easy to write, too, it's just photo-heavy.

Only one Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park in north-central downtown Seattle is bigger than an acre, big enough that it figured in my earliest plans for this series.  It is, however, a joke of a park.

Bell Street Park Boulevard

That's the name the 2020 real property report gives this "park".  The name at the parks department website is less incongruous, though not less misleading:  just Bell Street Park.

What this "park" actually is, is four blocks of Bell St (1st to 5th Avenues), one-way and single-lane as regards traffic, making room for roughly seven islands of plantings and interesting pavement per block, four on one side, three on the other.  (Hence it isn't really a "boulevard".)  Or maybe they're less regular than that; I didn't count every block.  These islands are highly similar.

So following my procedure with Ravenna Boulevard, one photo per island, was out of the question.  Not only would this result in more photos than Blogspot was likely to tolerate on a page, it would result in more boredom than I'm likely to tolerate on a hike.  Some other boulevards I haven't told you about yet, dear Diary, separate neatly, one island per block, and I figured one photo per block was a reasonable choice.

This is a view of the "park"'s start, from across 1st Ave.

This is a close-up of one of the islands between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.

This is an uneasy juxtaposition of public seating (those rocks are really the only seating the city dares provide here, for fear of homeless people) and private table.  I told you this would come up again, dear Diary, and watch for it below too.

That in the foreground is signage from Bell St's time as a "Stay Healthy" street.  As in Golden Gardens Park, so in "Bell Street Park", it was just too essential to resume letting people drive through.

The biggest park in Belltown is, obviously, a pretty cynical comment on the parade of parks in the previous page.

Now for a horse of a very different colour:

Seattle Center

For most of 2020, dear Diary, I expected your last series to be on the UW campus, one way of understanding which is as a collection of park-like spaces.  And in December I hiked a lot of parts of the campus with which I'd been unfamiliar, as well as some I'd known better, and took lots of photos, which is one reason I had limited storage space for photos on my phone thereafter.  The UW campus existed before then, but its landscaping - including many of its park-like spaces - originated from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which wasn't a classic World's Fair, but was a similar sort of endeavour.

So Seattle Center, once I seriously looked at it for this series, was easiest to understand as the creation of the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, which was a classic World's Fair.

Each is a large public space focused on many buildings, where those buildings are grouped in park-like settings.

However, beyond that, they differ significantly.  UW is focused on providing post-free education.  It takes serious money to attend UW.  As a result, it's a serious place.  It only names some of its parkish areas, often the smaller ones, and if an educational need calls for a new building, it doesn't hesitate to sacrifice some of them.

Seattle Center, on the other hand, while serious enough for the host of people who work there, is primarily in the business of entertainment, understood very broadly - everything from sports to music to TV, and, yes, museums.  From the classical music and theatre as well as the museums comes one of the educational institutions there, the Center School (an "arts-focused" honest-to-God Seattle Public School); from the sports, perhaps, the other, the schools' Athletic Department.  Similarly, KCTS brings in Crosscut, where my former editor Mark Baumgarten works.  And I'm sure there are other things that aren't obviously entertaining.  But the centre of Seattle Center is entertainment.

As a result, being essentially less serious by current standards, they take their park-like spaces much more seriously.  They name them all, and naming makes it harder to abandon them to building mania as at UW.  They also do something typically parkish that UW doesn't do, but that I'm not letting myself discuss in this particular series.

This makes Seattle Center's 74 acres (like UW's 634) an interesting contrast with the parks of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  Seattle Center is a whole separate city department, and it has a very different ethos.  (It's drenched in advertising, for one thing.  Imagine that in the real parks.)  I don't know how much landscaping help they might get in the real world from the parks department, but the results don't look much like the parks department's work.  On the other hand, both city departments are departments of the city of Seattle, so they share some perhaps-expected priorities.

In today's one-hour hike meant to get me to overcome my fear of Seattle Center, for example, I found two significant woods in the place.  One is meant to separate their main park, the International Fountain Mall, from Memorial Stadium.  It's divided by walls, by a promenade, by electrical lines; I couldn't begin to approach most of it.  The other woods, though smaller, is all in one place, and even has trails.  This is the Theater Commons, and in it, signs earnestly explain that it's not just a woods, which is good enough reason for existing, but it also helps with various environmental concerns.  So that's a Seattle thing.

Helpfully, all over the grounds are electronic kiosks that present the standard Seattle Center map with the main outdoor attractions highlighted in a green much brighter than most of the other colours in the map.  I cheated, and although I did hike each east-west street, essentially my entire photo-taking trip took only an hour and a half, thanks mainly to this map.

The Theater Commons was actually the last place I visited, as witness the photo's darkness.  The first main area I photographed was the Mural Amphitheater:

Then I went to the Broad Street Green, which is by far Seattle Center's most outward-facing park-ish place, and which is the clear winner for ostentatious public art among the downtown parks because it cheats.

How many other downtown parks have room for architecture, even phallic architecture?

Next the South Fountain Lawn, which delivers truth in advertising:

Inevitably, the one photo my umbrella messed up was of their main and most popular park, the only one I found crowded on a rainy December Sunday afternoon, the International Fountain Mall.

This is meant to have a fountain in the middle, and to be a promenade.  But all the fountains I found were at least off (one removed for renovation), and the promenade is only for serious promenaders, mostly children with their parents, because it can only be entered or exited for a quarter of its circumference.

Artists at Play is meant to be artists' idea of a playground.  Turns out only two artists were involved, and it's not a huge playground, but it's pretty darn big, far outshining other playgrounds known to me downtown.  (In fact, Seattle Center treats Artists at Play as one of its properties in the real property report, and says it's over 3 acres.  That's a typical size for the North Seattle parks called Playgrounds.)

And, um, that's it.  Memorial Stadium is a kind of thing we have in North Seattle, though I'm not sure how parkishly, but I found it buttoned up tight, the only glimpses I got (along a path that it turns out I wasn't allowed to take because I'm not a car) also showed me it was in use.

So those are the large parks Seattle Center fits into its area.  Seattle Center will happily inform anyone curious about smaller gardens, about the fountains that aren't currently running, about the skate plaza I didn't even visit...

One thing I found notable is that Seattle Center really believes in grass.  Well, so does the parks department, but with significantly more landscaping variety.  Also, when I hiked out onto the Broad Street Green to take the photo above, I found it extremely un-drained, and was grateful to be wearing heavy, high shoes.  Now, I've had similar problems in Magnuson and Green Lake Parks, but only when near bodies of water; what body of water is close to Broad St and John St?  So Seattle Center likes grass, but doesn't want it walkable.  (Hence, for example, promenaders on the International Fountain Mall might not want to make their own entrances or exits.)  On the whole, then, I'd have to say, the Seattle Center parks don't represent an alternative to the parks department that much interests me, aren't really a good reason to visit the place, unless, of course, one is a Belltown resident without good alternatives.

When I lived on Capitol Hill, I didn't often visit Seattle Center.  I did often try to, but routinely found that my event's starting time came about halfway through the endless hike along Denny.  I took to seeing the place as a wall around half the interesting things in Seattle.  I've probably visited it more effectively since becoming homeless, because the city makes this most commercial of its departments do charity every so often; the glasses I've worn while writing tonight's pages, I got from a United Way event there.  But only now, living far away, have I finally begun to get a handle on the vast place.  If it's a wall, well, half the interesting things in Seattle are worth scaling a wall for.  So I don't want to condemn the whole place, and hope myself to go to plays there in the future, or listen to KEXP, or ...  All I'm saying is, don't go for the parks.

Not that you'll go anyway, dear Diary.  But if you talk to their website, would you please let them know Firefox is throwing a hissy fit because their https certificate is outdated or something, and they should fix it?  Thanks.

I expect to have another page to write in you, dear Diary, related to but not in this series, sometime this week, or maybe next, and hope devoutly to polish off the legion of northeastern downtown parks this coming weekend.

Until then, good night, what's left of it, and good days.