Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part III: Southwest and Its Sweeps

Dear Diary,

None of the individual parts of this page concern all six hikes its title mentions; but this one concerns four of them, the next part too; all the others discuss only three.  Let's look at the whole set here:

• On December 22nd, 2020, I went hiking throughout southern Brooklyn, city and university parks both.  I ended up using some of the photos of the city ones in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal" on January 1st, 2021, and deleted those from my phone as usual, so all I have left from this date are photos of places I associated with the university.  This hike hasn't featured in the previous parts but is in all the remaining ones.
  
• On October 8th, 2022 I started hiking this area focusing on properties listed in the City of Seattle's 2020 Real Property Report.  This hike is in all the parts except part V, assuming I get that far.
  
• On October 16th I went back, focusing on areas that looked park-like in Open Street Map.  This hike is in all the parts except this one and part VI.
  
• On October 23rd I re-visited I-5 lands; photos from this hike were in parts I and II.  I-5 this far south is well above street level, so there aren't any photos from this hike in this part.  And the remaining parts of this page are east of I-5, so they won't have any either.
  
• On October 25th I photographed two sweep notices in the area this part covers.  So none of the other parts have photos from this date.
  
• And on October 29th I re-photographed the areas of which I still had December 22nd, 2020 photos, because I thought I needed to re-visit them all before telling you, dear Diary, about them anyway.  This part and all those remaining have photos from this hike.
  

This part not only features the most hikes, it also features the most places; even after I took the forgotten island in NE 40th St out of this part, it still has six left to talk about, as does part V; the others, three or four.

As in previous parts and previous pages from my October hikes to Ravenna and the U-District, in each individual part or page I'm going in order of the hikes.

So we start with:

805 NE Northlake Place (H on map)

Oh, oops, I've written myself out of having space for the map in the introduction, haven't I?  But let's continue that for a moment while I show you, dear Diary, the first of the December 2020 photos of places I thought belonged to the university.  In this case, the university's map agrees with the King County Parcel Viewer that I thought correctly.

My unreliable memory claims that I was struck, as I trudged from the Burke-Gilman Trail and North Passage Point back towards campus that day, by this explosion of green (in December, mind!) in a rather grittily urban neighbourhood.

Oh, neighbourhood, map, right?  Here:

That's the only place in this area of which I still have a December 22nd, 2020 photo, dear Diary.

So going on with October 8th:

North Passage Point (I on map)

This park was actually the reason I picked this region to start with.  I'd gone through the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation list of parks and found no additions in North Seattle, but one subtraction:  this park.

Most of it is the property of the State of Washington Department of Transportation, which has apparently stopped leasing it to the parks department and fenced it off because of chips of concrete falling from the I-5 bridge.  A host of sites still document it, but not the parks department's, so apparently the department's taken down its web page.

But such measures don't actually lead to actual land disappearing from the face of the Earth, so I went there to see what I could see.

What I saw was a fenced-off park.  I saw a man inside the fence to dip his toes in the water, who clambered over a shorter fence adjacent to leave; I saw a woman inside the fence to walk her dog, but she left on the other side, so I don't know how she left.

The shorter fence is in the photo immediately above.  But you see, dear Diary, there's also a gate, and if that woman had a key, she might've used that:

The side I was on while taking the first three photos is the parks department's side, which is not fenced off.  It includes the sidewalk whose decorations I praised on first visiting this park early in your life so far, dear Diary, and it includes some grassy land, on which, on this visit, I found an encampment of tents, presumably including homeless people.  Neither of the people I saw inside the fence lived there.

Northlake Park (J on map)

This "park" is simply an overlook adjacent to the sidewalk.  Well, the 2020 real property report claims it occupies 1,660 square feet, which implies that the land below the sidewalk, seaward, is the real park, but that's fenced off.  So most of my photos of this park have been views, and so's this one:

For much more about this park, see "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", linked up top.

Eastlake Ave NE Street End (K on map)

For much more about this park (not belonging to the parks department, and frankly not much of a park), see the street end page that includes it.

Peace Park (L on map)

My main concern in re-visiting all the parks in this region was to see what had changed.  Specifically whether water fountains had been added, for example, but also to see what had been subtracted from North Passage Point.  Or here.

That statue is "Sadako and the Thousand Cranes", made in 1990 by Daryl Smith, who is not the glass artist born circa 1973 and is not the artist in wood who was a school principal in Indiana at the time (LinkedIn link, requires sign-in), but is surprisingly poorly documented considering he also made the Jimi Hendrix and other rock legend statues on Capitol Hill.  And what has changed is that Sadako (portraying Sasaki Sadako, 1943-1955) doesn't have anything, not cranes, not candies, not nuthin'.

Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop (M and brick-red line on map)

I still haven't done enough research to reconcile the widely varying online accounts of Cheshiahud, an Indian with whom the 19th century settlers of Seattle interacted.  But at least I've finally paid enough attention to the flimsy little markers with which this sort of virtual trail, made out of existing roads, trails, and whatnot, is pointed out, to establish its path in the U-District.  Which led me to the shocking discovery that the parks department page links to a perfectly good map (1-page PDF) that could've saved me the trouble.  I think when I first downloaded that map on my phone, I couldn't get the phone's software to fix its mis-orientation, so forgot about it.  But I think one of the photos I took documenting my not so trail-blazing effort is worth showing you anyway, dear Diary:

So enough park appreciation.  We now take some time out for sweeps.

805 NE Northlake Place

On the 23rd, visiting various I-5 patches of land, I'd come to the conclusion that the land from 40th to 42nd had been swept.  This surprised me, because I knew that WSDOT had been criticised by homeless-haters as far too slow to sweep encampments for their tastes. [1]  So on the 25th, I went back to see whether my conclusion was right, and concluded, as related to you, dear Diary, in part II, that it probably wasn't.

[1] For more on WSDOT and sweeps, see an article by Leo Brine in Publicola on a bill that ultimately failed.

I don't have a clear record of what I did after that on the 25th, but anyway, I eventually came back here.  And found that a bunch of RVs that had been parked just north of here, essentially blocking drivers from reaching the end of Northlake Place, had been swept that very day, probably while I'd been dithering over I-5 land.  The only notice I found was this one:

Now, this came as a complete surprise to me.  Not the sweep, that is, but the notice.  I'd seen a sweep notice just two weeks before, issued in mid-September.

The two most obvious differences are that the new ones are much easier to read, and don't have dates issued.  The more I thought about it, the more confident I became that they weren't sweep notices at all, but notices following a sweep, intended to help people reclaim their property (or at least, ostensibly so intended).  So I freaked out all over again.  Had Seattle finally decided to stop warning people of imminent sweeps?

North Passage Point

It's certainly gotten looser in its legalese:

Unless I'm living on a different planet from the writer of that notice, North Passage Point isn't in "Burke Gilman Trail to NE Northlake Way and from Eastlake Pl NE to Pasadena Pl NE", it's south of NE Northlake Way.

So I went home and wrote to two real journalists who might be interested, neither of whom has replied so far.  And I stewed.  But six days later, when I came back to re-photograph the university parks of West Campus...

805 NE Northlake Place

I found two RVs parked along Northlake Place again, and the owner of one, who called himself Red, hailed me.  He told me he'd been on the streets most of the time since he was ten years old, and he was 42 at the time.  He said they had in fact gotten notice - visitors.  He also said his RV didn't run, needed a new engine which he couldn't afford.  Which I interpreted as meaning that his RV had been towed (either by the sweepers, or by a friend beforehand), and then returned to him.

So I still don't know whether Seattle is continuing to post sweep notices, physical objects that nosy people like me can see, as opposed to just notifying people they find on-site.  But it isn't (at least in this case) doing something as obviously wicked as not warning people at all that their lives will be up-ended.

Which brings me to the last photos in this photo-heavy part, since I then took a closer look at the explosion of greenery.  It turns out not to be so very green.  In fact, there's a big clearing in the middle of this vacant block.

Although I wanted to spend today at home, I panicked when I saw that both Open Street Map and Google Maps show a building on this block.  Had I gotten something catastrophically wrong?

The Department of Neighborhoods has a photo of a building, dated 2002.

The Department of Finance and Administrative Services has an April 2015 notice that the property is for sale (6-page PDF).  The city had acquired it in 1971 thinking it would need it for work being done at the time on Pacific St (which Northlake Way turns into there).  At the time a sculptor they call Theodore Jonsson already leased the land, and the city had renewed the lease as recently as 2014 (10-page PDF), but that was due to expire in 2019.  They worried that his sculptural work, in metal, had led to environmental contamination.

As it turned out, Jonsson, who'd been born in 1933, died in June 2015 at his daughter's house.

So the damage to the land, and a few bits and pieces, are what's left of the building.  This is a surprisingly recent park; its life as such can't have begun before 2015, which means the nearly two years between December 2020 and today are a significant part of its lifespan so far.  That it's come this far without, possibly, any real work by anyone, is impressive.

Meanwhile, I got the impression that Jonsson was another poorly documented sculptor, but that's because I'd looked for him as Theodore.  Turns out there are several pages memorialising "Ted Jonsson" and depicting his art.  He was an important advocate for the 1% for art policy, and an early beneficiary too.  His art isn't much to my taste, but I've liked plenty of other work paid for with 1%, so on balance, I'm grateful.  And also for whatever hypothetical pollution he may have produced that's intimidated anyone from building on his studio's former site.

So, dear Diary, another part with an ambiguously happy ending.  Good night, and happy hours until we meet again tomorrow.