The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part IVB: Central (one more place)

Dear Diary,

I have three places to tell you about in this page, and then another "today", or rather "tonight" page to write.  So let's get started.

(City of Seattle) Garden of Remembrance

This is a moderately small part of a block, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues and Union and University Streets, on most of which sits Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony.  I figured the garden back of the Symphony, with a name like that, would be dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, or some such.  Nope.  The most informative site is actually one maintained by the designer, which says it opened in 1998.  And it's dedicated to Washington state's war dead since 1941.  That site also says it has names somewhere, but I didn't spend very long visiting it today, and previously only came by night.  So here's what I found:

 

It has the big rocks on the left as art, I guess, or maybe their other sides are where the names are.  The smaller, carved stones on the right are, I presume, seating, more generous than the similar rocks along Bell St but similarly sacrificing comfort in the cause of preventing homeless people from becoming comfortable.

Carefully constrained parts of it do have plants, although "Garden" is obviously a misleading name for it.

It won more points from me for this fountain, still operating in mid-December unlike, for example, those in Seattle Center, than for anything else.

It's one of two public parts of that block, besides the sidewalks.  The other is a Sound Transit Link stop - one of the northern exits from the University Street station is under Benaroya Hall.  I find this hard to reconcile with the quiet symphonic music sometimes needs, but I suppose somehow or other they must have solved the problems.

(City of Seattle) Benaroya Hall

Yes, the city owns the whole block.  The Seattle Symphony just leases it.  Now, mind you, I just lease the room in which I'm writing this, and I wouldn't expect my landlord to come barging in.  So it's not reasonable to expect the public to have access to this building just because its landlord is the city.

But for some reason, the management of Benaroya Hall decided it was necessary to say this:

Which makes it very odd that last night, half an hour before a concert, I found this:

This is something a forthcoming page will go into more detail about.  Benaroya Hall is across the street from the US Postal Service's downtown post office, which is where I picked up my mail for most of the eight and a half years I was homeless.  It never occurred to me that the building across the street from there might let me in to use their restrooms, and if I hadn't found that puzzling sign, I wouldn't have worried about it.  But other places that have been advertised as offering their restrooms to the public are doing the same thing Benaroya Hall is doing, offering them only to the paying members thereof, and this was a chance to show you, dear Diary, how that looks.

As it happens, research I did in my album catalogues last spring showed that I'm not the cool listener who focuses on chamber music that I thought I was.  Nope, a solid majority of the classical music albums I've paid to own, well over a hundred of them, are actually symphonic ones.  So I'm not picking on the Symphony out of reverse snobbery.  It was just a strange and striking thing to find.

(Seattle Public Library) Seattle Central Library

As planned, once I'd documented the one place I'd added to my list of central downtown places from Seattle's 2020 real property report, I went back to the Central Library, returned the two things that had motivated the trip downtown today in the first place, and started taking photos to make up for my churlish refusal to do so in the previous visits that went into the previous page.

I got here just as mania for the current library building, which opened in 2004, was dying down, and still heard quite a lot about architect Rem Koolhaas's "cool house", har har har.  Having lived through something similar in Chicago, I've never really caught that particular fad, and in particular I don't think the outside of the library is all that prepossessing.  But in case any of your readers disagree, I photographed the part of that outside that works best for me, the 4th Ave plaza:

Once inside, it dawned on me that the previous page's list of photogenic parts of the library omitted one rather important one:  the awe-inspiring rows of bookshelves themselves.  In particular, the fiction shelves of the open third floor outdo the book spiral's shelves on the closed sixth through ninth floors because they're staggered, so even if my photo isn't very good, good photos can certainly be taken.

On the open fifth floor, I found that a large area where, early in my homelessness, I liked to plug in my laptop (I usually had a laptop, 2012 to 2017), had re-opened.  Most of this area had been taken over each winter for the United Way's free tax return project, and more recently that project had expanded to year-round.  They apparently expect to be back next month, so the rest of this year is essentially people's only chance to experience the part of the fifth floor where one can sit down without signing up for a computer, as it used to be, before competition for the few spots remaining left them fully occupied all day.

The equipment in the foreground belongs to a gentleman who considerately withdrew to let me take this picture.

One of the fifth floor's intended attractions is the chance to watch people move around on the third floor below.  I've never really understood this as an attraction, so hadn't really thought about it much.  But it turns out the ceilings that soar over the fifth floor actually also soar over the third floor, from which I took this photo:

I tried pretty hard to photograph the very weird artwork that's probably my favourite from this library, the parts of faces that say odd things to anyone who goes down the escalator from the fifth to third floors.  Unfortunately, it's a very balky artwork, often losing sound, visual, or both, and so I wasn't surprised to find it not running yet.  Anyway, this is the maugre best of four attempts.

And that's the set of photographs I took, trying to appreciate the Central Library better than I had last time.  I'm sorry most of them aren't all that good.

One more page, and then good night, dear Diary.  For now, good minutes.