Building a Baseline, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

While we can do lots of fun things together, including the current page "Under Construction", your core topic is public restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and outdoor water fountains, public or private.

As I told you two years ago, I categorise the hikes in which I document that core topic:  "everything", "water fountain" or "restroom".  Something I didn't mention two years ago is that in the hikes of January 2021, which were restroom hikes, I tried to take "postcard shots", photos making these mostly pretty pedestrian buildings look as good as I could.  This hasn't been much of an issue since then, because I haven't had occasion to introduce any new restrooms to you, dear Diary.  However, in "Under Construction" and in this page, that will finally change.  So postcard shots will come back.

The hikes I started in July are intended to be everything hikes.  This part of this page has four remaining topics:

1. Why bother?
2. What's everything? (sources of information)
3. What will I do? (photographic practice)
4. What will I write? (organisation of this page)

Why bother?

Your friend and mine, Anna Patrick, formerly of The Seattle Times's Project Homeless, asked me in summer 2023 why I'd continued writing you, dear Diary, after getting housed in March 2021.  The easy part of the answer was that I hadn't then even finished writing up the January 2021 hikes, and then there was the second Durkan Drought that year, by which I mean then-mayor Jenny Durkan's decision to misread CDC guidance on public water fountains to justify leaving park water fountains turned off.

The hard part is, why after that?  I mean, dear Diary, you were obviously born of a pandemic that's now been over for years.  Why continue you?

Because if park restrooms and water fountains ever matter again, it'll be easier to pay attention to them if you, and the tools I've accumulated to write you, are still around.

There are three obvious contexts in which those things could matter.

• The Big One.
• Another pandemic.
• A scandal.

I'm pretty sure most park plumbing is not earthquake-safe.  I don't actually think, dear Diary, you'll be able to help much after the Big One.

I don't much like to think about scandals, but it's less likely that one will happen involving park restrooms in North Seattle if you exist.  You've already been part of the pressure on Seattle's leaders to address the scandalous lack of public restrooms downtown.

But the main reason to keep you going, dear Diary, is that another pandemic could come.  It's true that this country went about a century without any, so this would seem to be a long shot.  But the more certain politicians try to criminalise the practice of public health, the more chance there is for the next pandemic to come a great deal sooner, and when it does, it will probably come in the five months of the year when about half of Seattle's park restrooms are closed.

Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation has a plan to make its restrooms winter-safe, but it sure doesn't talk much about that plan.  What I found in January 2021 was that Parks claimed to be doing things differently because of the pandemic, and in some important ways those claims were true.  But they'd opened no additional restrooms, and diseases like cholera briefly returned to Seattle.  That plan is important, and you, dear Diary, and I, can help cover it.

What's everything?

Why do an everything hike?

Because I don't have a reliable list of water fountains.

Your frenemy Rachel Schulkin is now, according to LinkedIn, an Executive Operations Manager for the city; according to PubliCola, she oversees "parks, libraries, Seattle Center, and the waterfront".

So I wrote to Christina Hirsch, the remaining "media contact" for Parks.  I heard back from a general public questions address.  Fine.  I have to prove myself again. I can do that.

They sent me to two GIS/data analytics pages.

The one for restrooms is pretty good, and I've found it reliable so far.  My main concern with it is that I couldn't find a way to download the dataset.

The one for water fountains, however, while easily downloaded, is disturbingly familiar.  It not only resembles the list I got in 2020, it could be that list.  It also claims all water fountains in North Seattle are working, and although an awful lot really are, that claim turns out not to be true in detail.

So, about existence, there are false negatives (Soundview Playfield now has multiple water fountains) and false positives (Licton Springs Park now has no water fountain).  And, yes, it lists Baker Park on Crown Hill, which, the last time I went there, I was told has never had a water fountain.

There are no false negatives about function, because the map doesn't admit any fountains aren't working.  Well, I've actually been impressed at the fountains I've found operating, the parks department does deserve to brag, but there are exceptions.

So if I have to go to Baker Park, why not go to all of them?

Concretely, as I mentioned in your first page, dear Diary, parks are pretty fun.  The weeks coming up are all that's left of the summer I was supposed to have no classes; why not spend them visiting parks?

Many of the parks in North Seattle don't especially welcome visitors.  Most, but not all, such parks are called "Natural Area"s.  I've long used a heuristic to deal with this:  if a water fountain (let alone restroom) can't be found, if no trail leads to it, it probably doesn't exist at all, and certainly doesn't matter. So all I have to do in the Natural Areas and their ilk is follow all the trails.  In reality, I don't expect to find a water fountain in any of these parks.

Anyway, to get back to the question up above, "what's everything?"

I plan to rely on my past lists, plus four sources of information.

The one I've used the longest, going back to May 2020, is the parks department website.  This has individual pages for many parks, most but not all of which are linked to in the official list of all parks.  These pages have symbols for parks with restrooms and water fountains, and these symbols are usually reliable.  No new North Seattle parks were in the official list in July.

Almost as long, back to June 2020, I've used the City of Seattle's real property reports.  These are reports from the city's Real Estate Services office to the chair of the City Council's Finance committee.  The link currently only gets the 2025 and 2026 reports, but at the Internet Archive, the chain goes back to 2013.  The 2013 report begins with explanatory text that suggests to me that it may have been a new thing then, or at least that any previous versions had been forgotten.  These real property reports have two parts, a text introduction, and a spreadsheet.  As now downloadable, all except 2014 and 2018 actually have the intro; all except 2023 and 2026 actually have the spreadsheet, but the 2022 spreadsheet has changes that make its listings hard to correlate with the rest.  The spreadsheet usually lists department, Property Management Area (PMA) number, name, location, address, classification (Fully Utilized, Excess, etc.), current use, and land area; it usually has more columns than that, but what they are varies.  Between 30% and 40% of each spreadsheet is the parks department.

The third source of information, on which I've relied since May 2021 , is OpenStreetMap.  OpenStreetMap is an invaluable resource for many purposes, of course, but specifically for our purposes, dear Diary, it's often just Too Much, and that has probably contributed to my failures to finish my grander projects since getting housed.

Which is why I'm very glad to report the last major source, which has been familiar to me since I started working as a tax preparer in 2007, but which I've barely used for you, dear Diary, before.  The current version of the King County Parcel Viewer offers a map drawn by property lines, and identifies each "parcel"'s owner.  As a result, if what OpenStreetMap presents as green space is really a bunch of private back yards, I can find that out from the parcel viewer.  (The parcel viewer also colours parks green, but only if they're owned by an official parks agency, so, for example, the parks of Seattle Public Utilities aren't coloured.). Each pop-up in the map for a parcel links to assessor's reports, which often include a photo, and tax reports, which go back about 30 years.

What will I do?

Hiking for you, dear Diary, essentially consists of visiting geographical features, in this and most cases parks, and photographing things of interest, usually, in parks, restroom doorways, and water fountains, the former open or held open, the latter in action dispensing water, if all is well.

In Seattle, park restrooms are usually promised to be open 7 am to 7 pm; in reality, because a limited number of staff unlock and lock the doors, the times vary considerably (please refer your readers, dear Diary, to the series "My Book of Hours" in August 2020), but I try to time my visits between 8 am and 6 pm.

In summer, the restrooms are supposed to stay open later, until 9 pm; that was the point of that series, to find out whether the parks department was doing that during the pandemic.  (It wasn't.  So that was something they did differently because of the pandemic, shortening park restroom hours.)  Near as I can tell, now the pandemic is over, 9 pm closings are back. 

Soon after getting housed, I learnt that Blogspot renames the photos I upload, which each of the phones with which I've taken these photos titles with date and time.  So starting with the May 2021 hikes, I made a point of including a daily newspaper in each restroom door shot and in each water fountain action shot.  And also of uploading the photos to my Google Drive the same day.  Theoretically I was also supposed to upload to Google Drive a close-up of the front page, to help in identifying the newspaper in the photos, but I was never very good about that.

Anyway, it turns out that if someone downloads a photo, Blogspot gives it its original name back.  By that time, also, I only uploaded occasional door and fountain shots to Blogspot, and at Google Drive they weren't renamed.  And, to be blunt, I can't afford daily newspapers right now.  So in most photos for these hikes, there's no newspaper.

So that's a change.  Another, probably more important, change is that I'm no longer photographing the doorways of women's restrooms.  That was always socially problematic, and now that the pandemic is over, I just can't see an upside.  I'm trying to at least notice whether the women's rooms are open, but in a recent hike of Green Lake Park, I failed to do that with two out of five restroom pairs.  Back then, I imagined finding a woman to accompany me; now, I see how unlikely that is, but in the event that someone wants equal treatment, she'd have access to a good list, linked above.  (It does, however, omit the composting toilet at Picardo Farm.)

Things that haven't changed:  I try not to photograph people.  I also try not to photograph homes, particularly tents.

So this is as good a place as any to mention what I've been seeing with regard to homeless people.  I've long complained about what the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has done with the federally required point-in-time count.  However, what I've been seeing is that a majority of the parks I've visited have isolated tents, a few have people sleeping rough, a few have obviously inhabited RVs, and a considerable minority have these:

The KCRHA asserts that homelessness has sharply increased around here over the past four years, and however much I doubt their methods, I'm fairly confident, now, that they're right about that.  What I haven't seen yet is the kind of sprawling encampments that were present during the pandemic.

I've long felt uncomfortable with how freely I wrote about such things at the time.  I re-read some of those pages today, and seriously doubt that I actually did wrong, made any homeless people known to those who did them ill.  For example, every park encampment I wrote about was in a park with a restroom, which a staffer visited twice daily, and the I-5 encampments had "sanican"s and had already become a political issue.  So this isn't an apology, but is an announcement of another change.  I intend to notice homeless people much less this time.

Which brings us to this part's last main topic:

What will I write?

I recently suggested to you, dear Diary, an ultimate fate of holding a bunch of park-specific pages.  I'm pretty sure most pages in "Under Construction" will be park-specific.

Much though I'd like to make that my norm already, though, it's too much.  I'm increasingly leaning toward being fairer to the downtown parks, and North Seattle alone has over a hundred.  I can't justify adding one or two hundred pages every time I do an everything hike, even though those aren't that common.

So, for example, I currently have a lot of crow to eat concerning Beaver Pond Natural Area.  That'll get its own page.  But the rest of that day's hike near Northgate will be a single page.

My current class isn't over, and won't be until August 26th.  I worked very hard last week to make time for you today, dear Diary, and can't predict when we'll meet again, but surely not later than August 27th.  Until then, happy days and happy nights.