Buildings of the UW's Seattle Campus, part I: Preface

Dear Diary,

The University of Washington's Seattle campus includes over 200 buildings; the exact number depends on exactly what one considers a building.

Some minor basics

It's useful to know that the UW itself considers the Seattle campus to consist of four individual campuses:  Central, East, South and West.

I photographed most of the parks of West, South and East campuses in December 2020, when there were few people around.  Because I have these photos, and haven't seen much reason to add parks to the lists I made for those campuses then, I'm set to tell you, dear Diary, about them any time.  My preference, however, at this point, is to integrate them into the deluxe sets of hikes I started last year with three of the eleven regions into which I've divided North Seattle, and have continued this year by beginning two more regions.

West Campus is part of Brooklyn as I've defined it, a sixth of one of the regions I'm covering this autumn.  Central and South Campuses are another part of that region (slightly bigger than Brooklyn), but my photos of Central Campus parks were probably less comprehensive, and anyway were on the phone stolen in July 2020; I'm waiting for Thanksgiving weekend as the earliest realistic date I can re-take them, and if campus is too crowded then, may have to wait until late December again.  East Campus, meanwhile, is in a different region whose parks I don't expect to get to this year at all.

In most respects, UW is very consistent about this list of four campuses, but there's one exception:  the numbering of parking lots.  Parking lots in East, West and South Campuses have numbers like E1, S1 or W12.  However, parking lots in Central Campus have numbers like C1 or N5.  Central Campus has way too many parks to talk about in one page anyway, so I expect to divide it the same way.  I see most of the parks of north-Central Campus as fitting into two tiers, and most of those of central-Central Campus as fitting into three columns.  Since Central Campus also has by far the most buildings, I'll probably split it the same way in this page, too.

Many of the named roads of the UW can be and are driven, and have no separated pedestrian paths.  Few if any of the drivers drive fast, so it's hardly ever actually dangerous, but to be a pedestrian at the UW is for me, at least, a minor adrenaline rush.   Another detail about those roads:  Many are named for the counties of Washington.  (King County is one of the few not included.)  In West Campus, which I'm covering first, there are only three examples:  Pacific St, Cowlitz Road and Lincoln Way.  Corresponding to the fact that many of the roads can be driven, few are gravel, but gravel (and even dirt) paths aren't so rare as to be surprising, in campus parks in general and West Campus parks in particular.

Why I'm talking about the buildings

Anyway, why is a blog about parks a place to talk about over 200 buildings?  Because you aren't a blog about parks, you're a blog about running water, dear Diary, and buildings in general have that.  I've already written about at least that many library buildings, and near as I can tell, pages I write about libraries are reliably more popular than those about parks.

In addition, please remember that when, last year, I introduced you to Seattle Center, I noted that it has in common with the present UW Seattle campus that it was shaped by a major fair, and also that both places are strongly parklike places in Seattle that aren't run by Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  Seattle Center is city-owned, while UW is state-owned, but this remains true.

Well, one important way these differ is that Seattle Center, like Seattle's parks department, has drinking water fountains outdoors.  In addition, Seattle Center has a restroom building whose doors open to the outdoors, as do many Seattle parks.  UW's Seattle campus, however, has neither of these things, with one limited exception in the South Campus, restrooms whose doors open to the outdoors, but are locked with a code requirement. [1]

So the only ways to get water on UW's Seattle campus, in general, are to bring it in, or to rely on one or more building(s).

Since your real topic, dear Diary, has always been running water, then, the UW's buildings are on-topic for you.

[1] I haven't actually tried to open every door on every building on campus.  It's conceivable, I suppose, that some door I haven't tried opens onto restrooms.  But there's a certain amount of crowdsourced information about this.  During the lockdowns, many people asked me where restrooms could be found.  Surely at least some of these people had tried some doors.  In addition, before the pandemic, a friend of mine had a parking slot in the central garage, and mentioned often seeing human Number Two and Number One in that garage.  Although this problem peaked every time the football team had a home game, presumably at least some of the problem was thanks to homeless people.  En masse, homeless people are pretty reliable as testers of doors.  Ultimately, this goes back to a principle I enunciated already in your pages in 2020.  If a water fountain, say, is buried amidst blackberry bushes, it effectively doesn't exist.  Water fountains and restrooms only matter if they're findable.  And during the lockdowns, nobody could find either on UW's campus.

Public campus, private buildings

All of that said, many of the university's buildings are in one sense or another not open to the public.  Although the university is publicly owned, as we've already discussed, you and I, dear Diary, not all publicly owned buildings are or should be open to the public, and the university actually offers an excellent set of examples as to why that might be the case.  The university owns a cyclotron and a wind tunnel, just for starters.   It also owns a plethora of buildings people live in by virtue of various kinds of leases.  It owns several buildings devoted to child care or even primary or secondary education.  Many of its buildings are primarily places for its non-academic staff to do their jobs, including places like power plants (several) which aren't normally open to the public in the outside world even when publicly owned.  Also as in most places, its theatres, stadia, and so on - its entertainment facilities, essentially - are usually locked when not in use.

The inscrutable

However, this leaves many other buildings which may or may not be open to the public.  Particularly in the northwestern U-District, the area I've called University Heights, but also in northern Brooklyn, several of the buildings shown on its map are actually rented, and so the owner's policies, as well as the university's, are relevant.  Beyond that, however, I think the main problem is that the university's policies are inscrutable; I further think that this inscrutability is intentional.

Some of this may be due to sloppy thinking.  As I've focused on this topic for the past couple of weeks, I've concluded that there are at least four audiences for information about any specific university building's hours, four groups for which the university might, in an ideal world, wish to offer different hours.

1. People specifically linked to that building as employees - employees of the university who have offices there; members or employees of athletic teams about to play in the building; etc.  People of this kind often don't care about posted hours because they have keys or equivalent access.
   
2. People specifically linked to that building as customers - students who have classes there; spectators about to watch a dance performance in the building; actual customers of things like coffee shops; etc.  People of this kind often don't care about posted hours because they take for granted that what they're there for fits within those hours.
   
3. People "affiliated with" the university, as students, faculty, or staff.
4. The general public.

Many buildings' hours signage fails to acknowledge this fact.  Many others acknowledge it only in the negative - "Authorized personnel only", most obviously.  Here are the few I found that take the trouble to differentiate hours based on which audience is involved:

As a result, as a general rule, buildings' posted hours are not reliable guidance as to whether one can lawfully enter the building.  In addition, possibly as a sign of transition between an old hours regime and a new one, an increasing number of buildings have multiple hours signs.

Notice the wrong sign as one enters, and one can become a trespasser without knowing it.  This is especially problematic at buildings, such as the Communications Building and Savery Hall, where the different hours are posted at different doors.

(That said, here's what I'm finding:  At many of those buildings, I'm not yet sure about all, the shorter schedule governs the locks.  Separately, in general, I'm not finding students in buildings on days when those buildings are officially closed.  With a few notable exceptions, but fewer than I'd expected, door schedules seem to apply both to students in general and to the general public.  I am, however, seeing students in some buildings whose hours have been shortened, after the building's official hours are over.)

More problematically, buildings' posted policies are also not reliable guidance as to whether one may enter.  Plenty of locked buildings have signs saying, in essence, "Hi!  I'm locked."  Plenty of others don't.  Plenty of unlocked buildings also have signs saying, usually more weakly, "Hi!  I'm locked.", but are in fact physically open to the public.  (Gowen Hall, just above, is one of these, as seen in that photo.  It's where the Tateuchi East Asia Library is, so the whole idea of "authorized visitors", taken literally, suggests that being literate in Chinese makes one potentially dangerous to people at the university.)  And again, plenty of others don't.

At this point it's very easy to make an obvious objection to this line of thinking.  Maybe the university just can't afford to lock all its buildings.  Its main means of locking buildings that get a lot of visitors is with card readers, a fairly modern technology that its older buildings may be hard or expensive to retrofit with.  There's evidence for this view:  some doors advertise that they're specifically closed, I infer for lack of card readers:

This, however, ignores two issues.  One is that the university is still, as recently as during the pandemic, building doors without card readers.

The text shown in that photo also clarifies why the university keeps its hours and building policies inscrutable:  So that "persons creating disruptions and/or obstructive behavior" can be subjected to the sanctions for criminal trespass, which include but aren't limited to prosecution.

And who defines disruptive or obstructive behaviour?  Well, recently, dear Diary, I told you about the Husky Union Building's definitions, but in most cases, I'm pretty sure the definition is in the eye of the beholder.  Which leads to the second issue with that objection.  Another major way university building policies are enforced, besides card readers and much less expensive, is peer pressure.  Human beings affiliated with the university explaining to human beings not affiliated with the university that the latter aren't welcome in some building.

The only dorm I think has a locked door during day or evening hours is Haggett, which is empty, awaiting demolition and replacement.  In my surveys of campus buildings, I've visited every dorm and many of the apartment buildings.  Apartment buildings' doors I tried were locked, but I only tried a few.  I didn't try the doors of any dorm except Haggett, but saw in many cases that they were quite obviously unlocked.  Some have clearly posted policies I saw that say explicitly that people outside category 1 above aren't welcome, that the only people who belong there are the specific dorm's residents and staff.  I didn't see such signs at all the dorms; perhaps some are lacking them, but also, I made a point of spending as little time as I could around the dorms, precisely because, even without anyone saying anything to me, I was well aware that as a middle-aged man, I was already outside the pale even being near those dorms.  I expect that if I'd barged into one, even if no staffer intercepted me, I'd be subjected to howls of outrage and calls to the UW Police long before I found a restroom.

In actual fact, the one time I've entered Smith Hall, the only building on the (Liberal Arts) Quad posted as closed to the public (but not locked), I was escorted out by a denizen of that building almost immediately.  (I don't consider it coincidental that signs listing building hours at Smith Hall which I saw when I did my original surveys are now all torn down.)  At one time, I spent the earlier parts of the mornings of major holidays outside, near the Communications Building.  Now, that building has been officially closed to the public as long as I've known of it, but on those major holidays, people in it often opened a back door - actually propped it open - anyway, almost certainly for the benefit of those of us waiting outside, and I went in to use the restroom several times (and, at least once, to explore; see what I mean about crowdsourcing, dear Diary?).  About half of those times, UW Police showed up before I left the restroom, presumably summoned by someone in the building other than the one who'd propped the door open.  (According to that back door yesterday, Communications is supposed to be open, though not to the public, on holidays.  The front door, which memory claims did open on holidays, currently says nothing of the sort.)

Flipside, some days ago, by no means looking or smelling my best and carrying three satchels, I passed unchallenged through the Social Work Building, Founders Hall, PACCAR Hall, and Foster Library.

Different buildings have different cultures, but offending anyone, voluntarily or otherwise, at a building posted as closed to the public, is asking for trouble.

Arbiters of trouble

Two important audiences for the behaviour of visitors unaffiliated with the university are the UW Police and a security force that UW started deploying shortly before the pandemic.

The UW Police are, in my experience, the kinds of professionals one wants to deal with when one is in trouble.  They know their laws, they seem to play fair by them.  Pleading a misleading hours sign to a UW Police officer is quite likely to have a good outcome, as long as the sign actually exists and says what one thought it said.  Flipside, UW Police are much less likely to be sympathetic if one is in a building, like Gowen Hall, posted as officially not open to the public.  But even then, in my encounters with them in the Communications Building, they consistently waited for me to finish in the restroom, and I don't remember them ever threatening me outright with arrest.

On the other hand, the security people, who are not sworn officers and are not armed, have consistently struck me as not very professional.  Savery Hall used to be an important place for me.  My first encounters with UW security came when they started enforcing new, shorter, hours for Savery, before the pandemic, and before those hours were posted.  (Which they now are, though they seem to get torn down often.)  Security people didn't consistently notice that I was in the building.  But when they did, they insisted that I leave without any justification other than their say-so.  Later, during the pandemic, I spent a lot of time on a sheltered bench outside the Bank of America Executive Education Center (much of that time, writing you, dear Diary).  Security people at least thrice threatened to have the UW Police arrest me for vagrancy, on the grounds that someone in charge of that building didn't want me there.  This reliably ended embarrassingly for the security people, with the summoned police officer patiently explaining that vagrancy laws aren't enforceable and the UW campus is a public place.  But these incidents didn't make my life any easier.

My methods now

I can't write over 200 books of hours, or even for however many buildings have open doors at all.

So I'm using a four-step process.  

1. I've already listed everything on UW's map that I consider a building, grouped by location.
2. For each building, I've visited and summarised what's posted about access and hours.
3. For each building, I've visited during normal business hours (and specifically during posted hours, if any), and seen whether whatever I interpret as the front door opens when I try.
   
4. Whatever post-processing is needed.  This includes verifying UW ownership (significant for West Campus, trivial for Central and South Campuses, and I haven't yet checked for East Campus).  It also includes trying doors during stated hours on weekends and during evenings; so far this is done for Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, but not for weekday evenings.
   

I'm not sure how soon I'll finish this work, but necessarily not today.  In the meantime, dear Diary, I wanted to write this so that what I say about the West Campus parks will make more sense.

That said, one important thing:  My park maps show UW buildings, like other public buildings, in blue (if open to the public) or, I think, teal (if not).  For the UW buildings, on the maps I'm using for the parks, blue merely indicates that the building is physically open (and not residential); it doesn't indicate that the public is welcome there.  In this page, the maps will be more complicated.

All for now, dear Diary.  I've finally got Brooklyn mapped, so expect to start writing about its parks today.  Happy hours until then.