Dear Diary,
Wow, it's good to be done hiking downtown to appreciate parks. I still have to hike downtown for two other reasons - artist credits and some carelessness about water fountains in some of my earlier hikes, plus the changing seasons affecting those. But I don't have to wear rose-coloured glasses any more, which should make it easier to see where I'm going.
Anyway, the parks discussed in this page have in common that they belong to a neighbourhood that's more than a little self-aware, and sees itself as transitional in relation to downtown, if not entirely outside it, kind of like Chinatown and Japantown in the first area I covered, the southeast.
As before, I'm going smallest to largest. However, two pairs of parks, I'm unable to determine the relative sizes of, so have just put them in the order I visited them Sunday.
Cascade People's Center
This is the one I visited for the first time last night. According to the King County Parcel Viewer, the entire block between Minor and Pontius Avenues N, and Harrison and Thomas Streets, belongs to the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation. But I'm treating it in three parts.
The smallest of those is a building near the southeastern corner of the block. Its website invites the right sorts of groups to rent it, but it's also the home to a bunch of activities, in which, near as I can tell from the ample signage on the doorway and elsewhere in the park, the YMCA takes the lead. And this is also a building the nearby P-Patch's gardeners use to organise a food bank that then distributes the food in the nearby park. The building has a plumbing system, but near as I can tell, doesn't have regular hours. It seems to have opened in the late 1990s.
Neither of my night photos of its doorway really caught much of the total building presentation, which includes the name in big letters and a bunch of organisations' logos, above the door. This is the less bad photo.
Cascade P-Patch
This is, like many P-patches, on parks department property. It differs from most P-patches in two important ways. One, it looks less orderly. Of course, as in all P-patches, the gardeners here each have their own space to keep, but it finds ways to keep that from being the main impression at least this visitor got:
Two, it has, I think, something to do with the "Giving Garden" around which the food bank is organised. I suspect many P-patches have some kind of relationship with local charities, but that seems to be considerably more organised and prominent at this one. That said, I won't pretend to be an expert. I did talk with some of the people setting up the food bank on Sunday, but not about what they were doing; sorry, dear Diary. The P-patch's website says it opened in 1996.
Next up is the first of the pairs whose relative sizes I can't judge.
(Seattle City Light) Denny Substation
This is a partly-triangular space which, when Seattle City Light was building a Downtown Substation (the name given in Seattle's 2020 real property report), they decided to offer as a park in order to get enough credit to block a street, or some such. Seattle Public Utilities parkifies its properties very often, and I've noted SCL doing good deeds like tiny house villages, but this is the first case I've encountered of SCL parkifying. Anyway, this triangle is along Minor Ave between John St and Denny Way, with the broader part to the north, although that broader part doesn't actually reach John.
The main thing Denny Substation is about is an off-leash dog area.
Its major amenities are benches and bulletin boards, and these are carefully allocated, one each within and outside the dog area, but the non-dog area is so split up, the grassiest part dominated by an artwork I found ugly, that really, there isn't much reason for someone who doesn't keep dogs to visit the place.
Denny Substation opened in 2018. As I understand it, the "temporary" off-leash area at Denny Park was meant to tide dog keepers over until Denny Substation opened. I wonder how many more years it'll be before "temporary" gets removed from the name. Not that I object to the off-leash area at Denny Park; what bothers me is the takeover of all of Regrade Park.
(Onni) Seattle Times Park
The Seattle Times seems to have tried several ways to parlay its headquarters area into South Lake Union real estate money, and the way that worked was giving up and selling, in 2013, to the Onni Group. The latter wanted to build on the park, but local opposition sank that, and their revised plans actually call for them to expand it. However, at present, Seattle Times Park, which is a small area on the southwest corner of Fairview Ave N and John St, isn't a park at all.
Those tents aren't homeless people's; they're open on their short ends, which homeless people's tents wouldn't be, and I assume they're there to protect people looking at blueprints and such. While Onni is a-building, Seattle Times Park is a construction staging area, and I think I also saw signs of work on the park itself.
As I walked away on John (unaware that it doesn't go through to Denny Park), I noticed something very odd.
I mean, yes, it's odd to see hand-washing stations associated with construction workers' "sanican"s, odd in a good way, but it's much, much odder to see fourteen "sanican"s in a row like that, outside the construction fence, and unlocked. It dawned on me that Onni was doing a surge, comparable to those in Iraq and Afghanistan years back. Vandalising one lonely "sanican" might be exciting, but vandalising a row of fourteen of the things would be way too much like work. There will never be enough homeless people there at one time to fill all fourteen, so Onni's workers won't be crowded out. And so forth. Dear Diary, I will recur to the surge metaphor in future pages, and regardless of my dislike for "sanican"s, I was thrilled to see such a clear demonstration of the power of surges.
The next two parks, I'm also unable to estimate the relative areas of, though both are definitely bigger than the two I've just discussed. This first one is barely bigger than one acre. I visited these two before the two above.
(SPU) Capitol Hill Water Quality Project
Trust SPU to find a boring name for something nice they do. This is a project to keep Capitol Hill's stormwater from pouring unfiltered into Lake Union. Instead it goes through bioswales laid out along Pontius and Yale Avenues N between Republican and Thomas Streets. You can read all about it here (PDF), dear Diary.
Anyway, these are very pretty bioswales, created by removing a parking lane, and widening the sidewalks in the process. On Pontius, with explanatory sign in front:
And on Yale:
It's recent, but although lots of people brag about it being nationally known (apparently CNN did a story), nobody seems to want to say when it opened, if "opened" is even the right word.
(REI) Unnamed park
This is the only park in this set with which I have a little bit of real history. When I started shopping for sleeping bags, early in my homelessness in Seattle, I figured REI was the place to go. Their prices soon convinced me otherwise; I ended up getting all my sleeping bags from a QFC, which however no longer wants to sell them, so I may have to go back to REI after all. Anyway, I was befuddled by the presence of all this Nature outside a downtown store.
My, how my views have changed. This may have been the single pleasantest part of my hike on Sunday. This woods is on the northeast corner of Yale Ave and John St, running north along Yale and east along John, on each of which streets it has at least one entrance.
The store opened in 1996, so I doubt the woods is older. I actually called there earlier this evening, asking whether it had a name, and none of the three people I spoke with knew of one; one said "It's our landscaping." Uh huh. It's a roughly one-acre park, and it ought to have a name, even though, but actually precisely because, naming something makes it harder to kill.
Cascade Playground
Dear Diary, I hope you aren't tired of this business of saving the biggest for last, but anyway this is the last iteration of it.
Cascade Playground has great edges:
surrounding a boring middle:
but maybe you can see, way in the background of that photo, the people setting up the food bank, which isn't boring at all.
I think that blue thing in the first photo above is the Little Free Library, in which I found mostly YA books, wanted several, but resisted taking any. On a different level of reading, signs in and near Cascade Playground were what reminded me of REI's park and informed me of the Water Quality Project and the South Lake Union Community Center. I think this park may really be, as its advocates certainly think, its neighbourhood's heart.
Most of what I want to say about Cascade Playground, though, has to wait for pages outside this series. Later this week or maybe this coming weekend, I hope to show you, dear Diary, a greatly improved map of all these places I've been talking about. And the artist credits will of course go into this series. But otherwise, of course, I have to put plumbing forward again, which will take some time, and I have a number of other series planned, including one for this weekend.
My intention is to return to North Seattle with a water fountain hike in January. One of the other series is also North Seattle-specific, but others are broader in scope. So I hope, dear Diary, you aren't tired of excursions yet.
Anyway, until later, dear Diary. Happy days and nights, and happy holidays, if it takes that long. Good night.
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