Dear Diary,
I've now mapped the park restrooms that were promised to be open in North Seattle last winter:
and then modified that map by what I found in February and in March:
The big circles that are obvious on the map represent differences between what I found and what we were all told last November. Eight of those differences are restrooms closed that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's spokes-person claimed would be open; and two are restrooms open that she did not claim would be.
- Little Brook Park. We were told the unheated wooden box of a restroom this park has would be open this past winter, and to emphasise the point, responsibility for keeping it open was given to both the Northwest and the Northeast parks maintenance crews. However, someone on one of those crews sensibly enough put a closure sign up instead. Lake City still needs real park restrooms, which should be in Virgil Flaim Park; it doesn't need jokes about the inadequate room it has instead.
- Jackson Park. The parks department tends to ignore this park in many ways, including lists of restrooms; in particular, the restrooms there are maintained, opened and closed by employees of a private lessee, not by the parks department. So this is more an apparent difference than a real one, but still, there's restrooms in a city-owned park that were open this past winter but not in the posted list, so it's still a difference.
- Sandel Playground. Both in 2020-2021 and in 2022-2023 I found the restrooms there locked; in both years they were supposed to open. I think this is a disagreement between the parks department's PR people and the northwest maintenance crew. I hope they settle it before next winter.
- Green Lake Park, Bathhouse restrooms. These are customarily open in winter and summer, but not in spring and fall, so again, I wasn't surprised to find them open despite their omission from the posted list, but it's still a difference.
- Salmon Bay Park. I'm not sure whether this building has heat, but it doesn't have much room for it, and these restrooms haven't customarily been open in winter. I'm guessing this lie was meant to appease people in Ballard who want the homeless to have somewhere to go besides the library and the bushes. Maybe including Ballard's city council member? Or maybe it was much less than that, just a joke on me, as previously suggested. Mind, dear Diary, I still don't have a clue why the indoor restrooms with doors that open to the outdoors, in the Ballard Community Center, close each winter, unless it's out of hatred towards homeless people. But we weren't promised Ballard Community Center last winter, and we were promised Salmon Bay Park.
- Green Lake Park, Shellhouse restrooms. These are customarily open year-round, but the building they're in is currently behind a construction fence.
- Ravenna Park, lower restrooms. These are customarily open year-round, but the men's room has been locked for years, and the women's room was locked too when I went there this past winter.
- Woodland Park, Citywide Athletics Building ("Rio") restrooms. These have also been locked for years, and have acquired an impressive amount of graffiti on this subject. Now, closing restrooms in winter that could be kept open is supposed to enable the parks maintenance crews to clean graffiti up, so I'm not sure why they're neglecting these examples. Nor am I clear on why the athletes were left without restrooms this past winter, considering that a perfectly reasonable alternative (Woodland Park Cloverleaf) is available a few blocks north, and was opened winter 2020-2021.
- University Playground. The restrooms have been closed for years, since the pandemic began and probably since before then. They've been fenced in, in the recent past; they're now welded shut. A blatant lie.
- Gas Works Park. A little further along than the Green Lake Small Crafts Center (whose restrooms are referred to by the name of the nearby Shellhouse); here it's the place where the building was that's now surrounded by a construction fence.
In the past, I've suggested that the parks department's pathological inability to tell the truth about its winter restrooms resulted from a sorcerer's spell. This year, there's perhaps a more prosaic explanation. This past winter, visitors to parks all over southern North Seattle, south of 65th, say, got to experience what park visitors in Lake City experience all the time: no restrooms. As many were closed despite claims they'd be open, as were open: Green Lake Shellhouse, Woodland "Rio", Gas Works, lower Ravenna, and University were all promised but closed; Woodland Pink Palace and 50th, Green Lake 64th, Wallingford and - I presume, not having gotten there myself - Laurelhurst were all promised and open. Now, something similar happens in West Seattle on a regular basis, and West Seattle typically has more political power in Seattle than southern North Seattle does. But maybe the parks department didn't like the optics of admitting how far someone needing a restroom would have to walk, in southern North Seattle, so it decorated truth with fantasy.
Or maybe it didn't like admitting how few open restroom locations in North Seattle it was using our tax dollars to support this winter, so it added a few it knew wouldn't be open. We were promised 25. We got 18. (Jackson Park's restrooms aren't supported by tax dollars.) In 2019-2020, we got 23. We got 72% of what was promised, and 78% of three years ago. In my experience, in school, these would usually be passing grades, but they aren't in my current job. Are they passing grades in parks department jobs?
At least this year, there isn't an agency serving the homeless that relies on the parks department to tell the truth about its own property. So with any luck, my former peers weren't misled by those lies. I wonder who else was.
Good night, dear Diary. I don't know when I'll be back, so have a happy spring, by day and night both.
