Bellevue's Downtown Park and News from the University District

Dear Diary,

I lied to you a little bit in splitting up the two pages I'm writing today.  In reality, I'd gotten very confused about downtown Bellevue's geography the night I saw Avatar, and came away thinking Open Street Map had made up fountain c out of whole cloth (because I'd looked at the wrong intersection) and thinking Bellevue Downtown Park (a specific park in downtown Bellevue, that is) had lots of water fountains.  It doesn't, actually, have six of them, as I came away thinking, but does have four, which is more than any park in North Seattle except Woodland and Green Lake parks.  So my point is that yesterday, Downtown Park was part of my planned itinerary, not just a stop on my way home as I implied this morning.  So here goes.

Bellevue Downtown Park

This park is pretty much the pride and joy of Bellevue's Department of Parks & Community Services.  So please excuse me, dear Diary, in a bit of park appreciation before getting to its water fountains.

Part of what confused me Monday night is that the only map the department makes available of the whole park, in the park, is one that explains in great detail that half of what it shows is future plans:

(Nor do I see a more present-focused map offered at the department's page about Downtown Park.)

So it was easy for me to figure that every time I got something wrong, it was because the map was ahead of its time.  The original reason I was going to split the pages I'm writing today was that I was going to fulminate about Open Street Map assuming a map of a future park was good enough for their current map.  Stupid me, no, Open Street Map was quite right in most particulars.  I ended up splitting it anyway, partly to give Downtown Park more prominence and partly because this page is photo-heavy.

Anyway, though, the core of the park is a circular (I assume) promenade, whose pavement is covered with sand or small gravel.  Most of the time, what's inside the circle is grass, but there's water flowing between the grass and the promenade the whole way:

And for the quarter-circle nearest the playground, the grass largely goes away, and they've set up a waterfall, much delighting the ducks as well as the children:

Oh, yes, playground.  If one does a search for ' "water fountains" "downtown Bellevue" ', most of the results don't allude to the broken street fountains at all, they're about either Downtown Park or Inspiration Playground, which has a map that doesn't try to instill doubt by referring to future plans:

And that map shows - I know this will be difficult for you to believe, dear Diary, of a park named Downtown:

Yes, they built restrooms not only adjacent to, but difficult to approach except through, the playground!  Those restrooms were also open Monday night, after 9 P.M.; Seattle's park restrooms close at 7 P.M. in October.

And yes, they have a restroom specifically designed for toddlers, too.

I'm worried about running up against Blogspot photo limits, so won't show you all the water fountains, dear Diary, but they're in the following places:  the northeast corner of the park, where one enters from Bellevue Way NE and NE 4th St; the northernmost point above the promenade, where Open Street Map currently shows one, but at street level not promenade level; next to the restrooms (a three-bowl water fountain, one of which overshot its bowl Monday night but had been fixed by yesterday), also shown by Open Street Map; and, um, 

one at the promenade's southernmost point that, unlike all the rest, flows only weakly, making it hard to drink from.

Anyway, can you believe it, dear Diary?  A downtown park with restrooms open after 9 P.M.?

The way home

Well, anyway, after that it was back to Seattle for me, but a very long hike.  I was very amused by a sign I saw at the last, or first, exits from the 520 Trail:

At least one town hereabouts agrees with me and Lezlie Lowe that public restrooms are a good thing to have around, not a bad one.

Anyway, once I was finally back on dry land, I decided to get to Ravenna Boulevard by way of Brooklyn Ave, figuring it would be less crowded.  Not very far north, this caught my eye:

Sound Transit is planning to build a barren windswept plaza, but apparently make it a little less windswept by planting some trees around it.  Um, one cheer for Sound Transit?

Further north...  Dear Diary, as I write up last week's hikes downtown, I'm going to be complimenting rapid construction being done by private enterprise.  Well, not all private enterprise is quite so efficient.  It's been years, guys.

Still further north, something caught my eye by not being there:

I thought University Heights, the building, was city-owned, but it isn't in either the 2020 or the 2022 real property report, so I thought wrong, and I should stop kvetching about their restrooms not being public.  But the plaza is a Seattle park, University Heights Plaza.  And in that park, during the pandemic, there were several "sanican"s and a hand-washing station.  Not any more.

I figured maybe the "sanican"s had been relocated, so I circled U-Heights, in the process coming upon the original Seattle Street Sink, another pandemic innovation.  This must be on land owned by U-Heights rather than the parks, since the then-mayor made it clear that she considered street sinks utterly illegal:

For what I think is the first time since I first saw it there, I tried it yesterday night, and to my amazement it was still running:

So, um, two cheers for U-Heights?

Anyway, dear Diary, that was yesterday's hike.  I'm about to write a third page, but then it might be a little while before you hear from me again.  Happy days and nights until then.