Under Construction, part V: Northgate Park before

Dear Diary,

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has twenty-six community centers, ten of which are in North Seattle.  Most of those are in parks with the same name:  Ballard Community Center in Ballard Playground, Laurelhurst CC in Laurelhurst Playfield, Loyal Heights CC in Loyal Heights Playfield, and Ravenna-Eckstein CC in Ravenna-Eckstein Park.  Some are drowned in much bigger parks, such as Green Lake or Magnuson.

This can create problems of attribution.  My solution is pretty simple.  All  community centers known to me are single buildings.  So parts of those buildings belong to the community centers; things that aren't parts of those buildings don't.  At Loyal Heights, for example, the restrooms are in the community center building, but with doors that open outside; one of the water fountains is attached to the building, so it's the community center's; the others, free-standing, are the playfield's.

Most of the time, Parks doesn't complain about this system.  But someone is trying to erase Northgate Park in favour of Northgate Community Center, and they're choosing weird ways to do it.  The list of water fountains I downloaded doesn't attribute the attached water fountain to Loyal Heights CC, or any other fountains to any CCs - except that it calls Northgate Park's free-standing water fountain, which is at least twenty feet from the building, Northgate CC's. What's more, the park's official Web page no longer includes the symbol that indicates a water fountain.

And more to this page's point, they're doing the same thing with the park's playground.

Now, to be fair, Northgate Community Center has two doorways, and has intelligently used them to run the child care stuff that all the community centers are still doing out of one door, and the rest of the stuff community centers normally do out of the other.  Better still, the child care doorway faces the playground.  And, in fact, the only people I saw using the playground on three brief visits were coming out of the community center, not separately visiting the park or spilling out of the adjacent Northgate branch Library.

So if Northgate CC weren't already trying to steal a water fountain, I'd probably be OK with them taking credit for this playground.  But they overreached.

Which, I think, is why Northgate Park is a surprise. It isn't in the article that initially prompted this page, and it isn't in the list I used to add some parks to the article's list.  I only came across it visiting the park for my baseline.  My best guess is that whoever at Northgate CC is so grabby of Northgate Park's stuff doesn't want their project rubbing shoulders with other ordinary parks' projects.

Anyway, though, going forward, I'll be looking for other cowboy project signs while I look for water fountains.

As to the schedule that sign swears by, well, I'll have more to say about timing in the next two parts of this page.  But on the premise that the Northgate Park playground may go away soon, here's a photo:

Good night, dear Diary.