Building a Baseline, part IV: Around Seattle's northwest corner

Dear Diary,

This part concerns three places, one of which I've never seen, and a different one of which is quite far from the other two.  So it's a dubious gathering.

But that's what these hikes' version of "inconvenients" are like.  In part II of this page, I wrote "Most of North Seattle is, on the maps I drew, full of interesting places to go."  The first day I tried to visit 20 destinations, September 1st, only four were left for Northgate.  (I then ruled one out of that part.)  So I looked for isolated destinations that wouldn't take bites out of the main web, and this part and the next, about Bitter Lake Reservoir, are examples.  (Northgate and Bitter Lake itself are bites out of the main web, but ones I felt relatively confident about.)

Here's the usual OpenStreetMap map:

So let's go!

Unidentified exclusive park (A on map)

There's a vacant lot, about fifteen acres in size, just north of the City of Seattle park, seven acres, Llandover Woods.  This vacant lot goes up to the city's border with Shoreline.

From the website of the owners, The Highlands, I'm fairly confident that this lot is, or is part of, a park.  That website doesn't name most of their extensive parks, and specifically not this one.

The Highlands is a gated community in Shoreline; this may be their only Seattle property.  One gate, in the form of a guard station, is visible from near Llandover Woods's entrance:

I'm afraid, dear Diary, that this is the first of the five parks getting their first descriptions in your pages that I mentioned.  But the best of the five is also in this part.  If this park has an address, I don't know it; the King County Parcel Viewer doesn't assign addresses to vacant lots.

Llandover Woods (B)

This is a woodsy park at 14499 3rd Ave NW, with trails and distinctive benches as its main amenities.  I've only discussed it with you, dear Diary, once, I think, in November 2020's "Top of the City, part III".  Unaccountably, considering that I would soon start writing about topography, I left out any reference to its spectacular relief.  (Basically, Llandover Woods, and for that matter Llandover on the Sound, the home owners' association, are on the slopes of coastal cliffs rather like those I described, not very well, in "Land and Water in North Seattle, part II: The Lake City Coast".)

There are two main trails, one of which marches efficiently from entrance to exit.  The other wanders more, has less official trails branching off from it, and is simply more fun.  Unfortunately, to make that latter trail work, they had to include stairs.

I did have fun there, and will try not to let six more years pass before I visit again.

Dunn Gardens (C)

This is a garden property that boasts of being the only publicly accessible example in Washington of a garden designed by the Olmsted brothers, the same people who designed Ravenna Boulevard.  It contains two (not very) private residences, and I ended up leaving by the driveway of one.

Its management has a very clear idea of who its main audience is (unlike me!), and the gardens' home page brags about their "all terrain wheelchair".

This is a privately owned park, part owned by the E. B. Dunn Historic Garden Trust, and part by the owners of the private residences.  And I took way too many photos to fit into this part, and liked the place enough that I want to give it its own page anyway.  So that's the last page I hope to write in you tonight, dear Diary.

This much more teaser, though:

Baseline for the northwestern corner of Seattle:

Dunn Gardens - One water fountain, running, and with the sort of water delay that fountains at Northacres and Cal Anderson parks have.  They bought it expecting it to run all year, and it looks like they got their money's worth.  Two non-gendered single user stalls, one wider than the other and presented as accessible.  All at least notionally paywalled.

I hope to get back to you soon, dear Diary.

Foolish Mortal Jumps into a Beaver's Pond

Dear Diary,

I'm very confused.

It's fairly clear that I've written about Beaver Pond Natural Area in your pages twice before, in the obvious places to look, the everything hikes.  In "South to and from Northgate" in May 2020, I wrote "The Natural Area extends northeast of the trail system, but I've found no entrances or maps".  In "A Hike in Northgate, part II" in May 2021, I wrote "And from here I was able to clamber up the embankment to Roosevelt Way NE".

Well, Beaver Pond Natural Area's full extent is from 5th Ave NE to Roosevelt Way NE.  (Also from NE 100th St to the level of NE 108th St.)  And my map dated 2019 shows that full extent.

So the mystery is not, as I'd thought, why I only learnt of this park in bits and pieces.  Rather, it's why I've twice now only remembered bits and pieces, and faulted my past self for knowing less than I actually had known.  And I think maybe it's because this park is being actively worked on.  In 2021 I clearly said I found nothing at the dead end of 9th Ave NE, but that wasn't the case this time at all.  So if I only visit it at long intervals and find everything changed, I'm inclined to blame my past knowledge, rather than assume a park, of all things, has changed while I wasn't looking.

Well, let me write about and show you, dear Diary, photos of the park of 2026, in hopes that next time I'll be kinder to myself.

Beaver Pond Natural Area consists of four city blocks diagonally arranged.  (It doesn't fully occupy most of those blocks, but anyway.)

Here's an OpenStreetMap map, stippled background courtesy of Microsoft Paint.

On August 4th I was proud of myself for quickly finding that there were official trails in those two southwestern blocks, and not just the shorter unofficial trail near the bus stop.

But then I got home, found out about the other two blocks, and promptly and wrongly blamed my past self.

So on August 7th, I went back determined to get to know the northeastern two blocks.  I found no entrance of more than a few feet into the third block, the one OSM puts an actual beaver pond into.

However, that was enough to take one of my most successful photos of water, maybe part of the pond.

Twenty minutes later, I reached the dead end of 9th, and what a difference five years make.

Since this fourth block is the only one fully included in the park, it has the most opportunity for trails and variety, and the Thornton Creek Alliance has delivered.  I wrote about the primaeval in 2021, and felt the same thing this time, because of the giant trees.

The park may not be done changing, since they evidently continue to monitor conditions:

Somehow I ended up finding a map last of all.  It's a bit unclear because the bright colour is the creek, not the trail, but maybe it's good enough.

 

And isn't that just like life, to find the map only when it's all done?  I still hope to write two more pages in you tonight, dear Diary, but we'll see.  Happiness until then, anyway.

Building a Baseline, part III: Around Northgate

Dear Diary,

Well, I've finished the spreadsheet, uploaded it and shared it, so if I'm extremely lucky, people can now read or download it from here:

Google Drive link 

The total places I'm trying to visit turn out to be 500 - 323 city owned, 126 from OpenStreetMap, and 51 from The Emerald City Resource Guide. 

Today I don't think I can hike at all; but I can write.  And it turns out, there's a lot of news - to me, at least - in this area.  Here's a map.  I should probably tell you, dear Diary, that while I'm writing on my phone, I'm doing most of the work on my Windows laptop.  (My Linux laptop, on which I'd written you for years, is broken.). So this map represents a learning curve.  It is, of course, based on OpenStreetMap.

I covered several of these places in two parts in the third series of regional hikes in May 2021, so I've felt free to not photograph everything this time.

And now to start, in hiking order:

August 4

The news didn't really start this day. 

Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel (A on map)

I've shown you this Seattle Public Utilities park, I think, several times now.  Its address is 330 NE 100th St, and it stretches north to 103rd, near the exit there from the transit station.  It's in the Thornton Place apartment complex.

This time I hiked all the trails, as promised, and found neither restrooms nor water fountains.  It does have lots of benches, and, being an SPU park, lots of explanatory signs.

So I just settled for two photos.  One sign, and one glimpse of the reason the park exists, the South Fork of Thornton Creek.

Maple Leaf Community Garden (B)

This is one of the two P-patches in North Seattle owned by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  Its address is 529 NE 103rd St.  It's really a P-patch, a shared garden, but has an interesting tower, which I've shown you before, dear Diary, so this time I settled for photographing a bench with words written on it whose sententiousness pleased me.

 

Beaver Pond Natural Area (C)

OK, this is sort of news.  Years ago, dear Diary, I told you about this park, and then told you I'd gotten it all wrong, and the park was actually twice as big as I'd thought.  So it's extremely humiliating to discover that I was wrong then too, and the park is actually four times as big as I'd originally thought, twice as big as my revised version.

As a result, I have much more to tell you, dear Diary, about this park, than will fit here, so see a separate page coming soon.

I should say, though, that my main memory of this park was that it had lots of litter, and I didn't find any this time.  Also, the part I found first is the basis of its address, 10300 5th Ave NE.  Right next to a bus stop.

Northgate Park (D)

I thought, on August 4th, that the water fountain in this quite bland lawn of a park (address for both the park and the community center below:  10510 5th Ave NE) was the only example of our core topic, water fountain or restroom, that I'd find in this area.  This turned out to be wrong.  That said, the fountain was running, and I refilled my bottle there.

Northgate Branch Library (E)

I verified that the restrooms were open and the water fountains running, and that was that.  Address:  10548 5th Ave NE.

Northgate Community Center (F)

The story is pretty much told in the recent part in "Under Construction".

Hubbard Homestead (G)

This one, too:  link.  With a link to a whole part about this park in the regional hike of May 2021.  Address:  11203 5th Ave NE.

Victory Creek Park (H)

The reason I had to tell you, dear Diary, about the strange absence of litter in Beaver Pond Natural Area, is the severe contrast with Victory Creek Park, whose address is 1056 NE Northgate Way.

This is a very weird park.  It's a few benches and a former playground versus a daylit creek, the titular one, a tributary of the South Fork.  As I mentioned in the "Under Construction" page about Hubbard Homestead, it's adjacent to a QFC, usually entered through the parking lot.  I'm not sure whether to admire Parks for sticking to the fact of the daylit creek, or pity the neighbours who might want a more conventional park.  But I can't help wondering whether the litter says what it isn't politically correct to say out loud, that nature isn't the only thing people want out of parks.

At any rate, I made one attempt to photograph the creek, and took a photo meant to illustrate what it's like walking this park's trails.

August 5

The news starts here. 

Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area (I)

This is one of 2 1/2 Seattle Parks parks in North Seattle that I couldn't find in 2020-2023, as I'm sure you, dear Diary, remember.  Well, this time it was easy.  The King County Parcel Viewer steered me right there, and the address, 1039 NE 108th St, slots this tiny park in right where it should be, between 1019 and 1223.

See, it's the property on that block that isn't just fenced, it's walled:

I trespassed a bit onto 1223's lawn to find the reason.  Someone had littered a boat there!

August 7

This was the day I spent on Beaver Pond Natural Area.

August 18

Northgate Mall's Central Park (J)

Over the years that Northgate Mall has seemed to consist mostly of construction fences, I've occasionally looked at the mall's  Central Park, but all I remember seeing was a concrete plaza where people were sitting on that trendy "bistro" furniture and presumably discussing shopping strategies.

This time, I decided I owed it to the mall, this odd neighbourhood's centerpiece, to look more carefully.  And lo and behold, one level down, there's a small playfield, there was a girls' team practicing there, 

and what was that behind them?

Now, dear Diary, for good reason it's been an article of faith for me that privately owned parks in North Seattle just don't do plumbing.  But the surprises didn't end there.

Look, ma!  It is possible!  A restroom whose door opens to the outside, not just near Northgate, but actually in Northgate Mall!

Who knows?  Come the next pandemic, this restroom may be open.

Well, a lost park found, and a privately owned outdoor restroom, surprises enough, but there's one more to come.

September 1

King County Veterans Program (K)

On page 137 of The Emerald City Resource Guide, 8th edition, in the chapter "Veteran Services", we read:

Provides emergency financial assistance, housing system coordination, case management, social work, and education and employment resources.  Documents required include proof of service (prior or current) as an active duty or reservist member, documentation of King County residency, and proof of income eligibility for financial assistance. 

This program is at 9725 3rd Ave NE, not at all far south of the transit station, but an office building much too swanky to have sidewalks.

This occasions a certain amount of culture clash with some of the program's clients:

Northgate Station (L)

On September 1st, I bought my bus pass at Roosevelt Station, and then explored the station looking for restrooms, for practice.  So it was a welcome surprise to find the ones at Northgate Station, one of whose addresses is 100 NE 103rd St, the first place I looked.

And, yes, the rules were as I'd vaguely remembered:

But the surprise came after I'd put this phone away.  I saw a security guard escorting a customer or two, no surprise given that procedure, but all the guard seemed to do was push the door open.

That mezzanine is not really outside, but if Sound Transit has actually given up on keeping restrooms locked by default, a pattern that goes way back to before Sound Transit itself existed, to when there used to be token restrooms in suburban transit centres, that's very good news.

Anyway, no more surprises, just an SPU property not big enough to be one of their best.

Northgate Pump Station (M)

Near as I can tell, the only example of SPU park style here, at 400 NE 115th St, is a couple of big, old trees.

But that isn't nothing.

Well, dear Diary, that's my baseline for Northgate:

Northgate Park - running water fountain

Northgate Mall - triple water fountain, the parts for humans and dogs running, the part for bottles not running; gendered single user stalls open

Northgate Station - ungendered single user stalls apparently open, and you may rest assured I'll be checking further on that

Let me rest some before explaining to you my career of error about Beaver Pond Natural Area.  Happy times until then.

Building a Baseline, part II: North Seattle Remit

Dear Diary,

Today I did a lot of hiking, and I have a lot to tell you about it.  I could tell you right now about what I found 1) near Northgate, 2) near Seattle's northwest corner, and 3) near Bitter Lake Reservoir.  But I have to go back to the neighbourhood 4) around Bitter Lake itself tomorrow, and then it's supposed to pour rain.

So I think I probably can't finish these hikes before the quarter begins September 21st, and I'm not sure how close I can come.  On the other hand, I have arguably five parks to tell you, dear Diary, about, that I've never told you about before.  So I think the way I'm doing this is worthwhile, and am unlikely to retrench much.

Especially since it's actually true that Seattle's parks are often in fairly inconvenient locations.  Much of my planning had as its goal interrupting boring long walks with other things for me to do.  I've pretty much succeeded.  Most of North Seattle is, on the maps I drew, full of interesting places to go.  So the purpose of this part of this page is to explain to you what I consider interesting.  Especially since it turns out I thought pretty much the same things were interesting when I planned regional hikes in 2021 and 2023.

So OK.  My maps have basically three sources:  real property reports; OpenStreetMap as constrained by the King County Parcel Viewer; and the 8th edition of The Emerald City Resource Guide.

Real Property Reports

First the easy stuff.  I started with the 2013 report, listing everything in it.  Then I went through comparing it with the 2025 report, since the city didn't release the actual spreadsheet this year.

Finally, I compared the result to the 2020 report, adding anything that had been acquired since 2013, or anything they hadn't thought to list in 2013.  One of the purpose of doing this is to find out how many of these properties listed in 2020, but not in 2025, these leases, easements, and whatnot, are actually showing signs of city involvement, and of similar purpose, today.  I don't know for how long the 2020 listings can remain good, and want a calibration.  If I have more money later, I can file a Public Records Act request, and get updates that way, but for now hiking is easier.

I did all this in spreadsheets, to make it easier to add data from other real property reports later. 

Anyway, most of the real property reports are sorted by department, and which department a property belongs to greatly influences whether I ended up listing it.

Let's start with the big and the obvious:

I'm going to every property listed in any of those three reports as belonging to the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.

Also, I list, and will go to, community centers and pools separately from the parks they occupy, and list and will visit all shoreline street ends and all waterways.  (But I know I already showed you, dear Diary, photographs of those last, one each of the waterways and three each of the street ends, so I probably won't photograph most of them this time.  This also applies regionally; I photographed much more in Bitter Lake than in Northgate, which I covered in a regional hike in May 2021.)

Beyond Parks, let's go through the departments in the 2013 report's order:

Department of Information Technology:  They only listed one site in Seattle, which I listed.

Department of Finance and Administrative Services:  They list tons of sites for tons of departments that don't pay attention to this stuff.  I listed fire and police stations, for example.  In 2021 I had qualms about photographing fire stations because firemen live there close to half the time, but the first one I came to offered the public blood pressure tests, so I went ahead.  The fire station I photographed tonight doesn't have a sign about those tests, and does have a sign saying "Key card access only", but it seems firemen still do offer such tests, so I'll go on photographing.  FAS also lists other things worth visiting.  What I'm not doing, this time, is visiting any "snippets" or "parcels" of theirs.

Office of Housing:  They never list all that much, nowhere near as much as they're actually involved with, but everything they do list, I do too.

Seattle City Light:  I reliably find their properties and former properties (they burn through substations like nobody's business) interesting.  Sometimes an SCL property is a six acre park enclosed in a steel fence.  Sometimes it's a tiny house village.  You never know.  So I've listed all those that Seattle appears still to own.

Seattle Department of Transportation:  With them, on the other hand, what you see is what you get.  So I list anything they imply is a park.  (Peace Park is theirs.)

Seattle Public Utilities:  They parkify a lot of their property, and I like their style.  Much of their property, like 1/7th of Bitter Lake or their operations in distant places, is outside what I'm willing to deal with, and some, like a 5 square foot standpipe, doesn't make sense to me, but any time they claim enough North Seattle land to find, I want to see it.

Seattle Center:  Doesn't own any land in North Seattle.

Department of Neighborhoods:  All they ever claim is P-patches, city sponsored gardening plots for people.  Two of these are official North Seattle parks, and I've already photographed bits of those, but in general I don't think I'm all that good at photographing garden plants, and intend, with most, just to make text references, either "this park" or "this neighbourhood also contains a P-Patch".  But I've listed them all, so I can show you, dear Diary, the signage for the ones not in parks, and so I can give in to inspiration if it comes.

Seattle Public Library:  I list all their properties in the area of concern.

OpenStreetMap

This is the most optional category, but not very optional.

I looked for big campuses, all over North Seattle.  Several major institutions - both colleges, and both shopping malls - actually qualify by having outdoor water fountains and/or restrooms whose doors open to the outside.  Hospitals, not so much.

Reading Ken Ilgunas's book at the same time, I looked for fences:  Cemeteries.  Playgrounds.  Exclusive parks.  Playgrounds brought in most, but not all, of the schools in North Seattle, and one reason I have to go back to Bitter Lake is that the signage at Broadview-Thompson confused me, and I had to look up the policy, which does say, as I remembered from my first years in Seattle, that public school playgrounds and playfields are open to the public, but under conditions that will get much tighter once daylight saving time ends.  Playgrounds also bring in Seattle Children's Hospital.

Although I concluded there were too many undeveloped streets to visit, and on too shaky legal ground, I added a few really substantial ones in precisely two of the neighbourhoods that maintain exclusive parks, Blue Ridge and North Beach.  Because I really want to know what's been done with those.

When I went along I-5 in 2023, besides talking about encampments, I discussed the land's potential, and I've given myself the opportunity to re-address that topic. 

At the last minute, I added the light rail stops.

These added over 100 places to go, to about 300 city-owned. 

A terminological note

I think I'll need to use clearer words for non-governmental parks.  Most admit the public, though some require fees; these are privately owned.  Some don't admit the public; these are exclusive.

Emerald City

I wanted to introduce agencies, whether governmental, non-profit, or even occasionally for-profit, who help homeless people, and I knew I didn't know enough about such agencies to do the job myself.  So I outsourced the job to the people who do a professional list each year, the Real Change News people.  North Seattle is a real backwater in the book they produce, but I found 58 more addresses.

Summing up

So I have about 450 places to go, and have already visited maybe 40.

I went to 20 today, it took a lot out of me, and I have a few to return to and a lot of writing to do.  I've given up hope of doing a downtown baseline this year, and I think I have to give up hope of finishing by September 21st.  The hard deadline is early November, when Christina Hirsch will announce that work has already begun on turning off water fountains and closing restrooms.

Until tomorrow, then, dear Diary, and good night.  

 

The Right to Roam, or the Wrong to Roam?

Dear Diary,

One of the three main sources on which I'm relying to plan my baseline hikes is a scan of North Seattle, last week, in OpenStreetMap, as constrained by the King County Parcel Viewer.  I noticed early on that most daylit creeks were on private land.  However, in the area between Carkeek and Golden Gardens parks, more or less the middle of western North Seattle, there were two creeks more or less in the middle of undeveloped streets.

So I began thinking of undeveloped streets as a gold mine of unrecognised public land, just waiting for publicity.

But around then, I started to accumulate evidence that even developed streets aren't public land.  For example, I downloaded block-by-block data on Seattle's streets, from a Seattle Department of Transportation GIS application, and in that enormous dataset SDOT claimed to own only 125 blocks.  It attributed 625 to Washington state's Department of Transportation, a scattering to other owners, and the vast majority to no owner at all.

I'll get to this question's answer below, but first I want to tell you, dear Diary, about a book I found while hunting for that answer.

This Land Is Our Land:  How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back by Ken Ilgunas

Ilgunas previously wrote a book titled Trespassing across America, and this 2018 book is his attempt to provide the philosophical basis for the story that book tells.

A friend about as consistently right wing as I am left wing told me, long ago, that one of the Unabomber's main complaints was that he couldn't just go whatever direction he wanted, whenever he wanted.  I scoffed that he couldn't have grown up in forested land, to have such a silly view, and there the discussion ended.

But Ilgunas argues that property rights have, over the past two centuries, gone too far, and American Supreme Courts have been instrumental in this.  Some billionaires now own more square miles than some U.S. states occupy.  And "the right to exclude" has gone from being a far-fetched legal fantasy to being seen as central to the whole concept of property.  He notes that "No Trespassing" signs have a history, and it's a surprisingly recent history.

He acknowledges that a lot of countries share the American extreme view of property, but goes into detail about how Sweden has developed completely differently, and how both England and Wales, and Scotland, had more or less imitated the Swedes.

I can't help thinking Ilgunas knows his ideas have no chance here.  He explicitly mentions millions of homeless people, but never considers the implications for his dreams. 

The Wrong to Roam?

Ilgunas acknowledges that a lot of people dislike the phrase "the right to roam" as just as absolute as what it fights, and prefer something like "responsible access".

By no standard of responsible access is Seattle a good place to start roaming.  One of the key elements of responsibility is respecting the owners' privacy, and most lots in Seattle are much too small for trespassers to do that.  (Part of privacy, after all, is not just not being watched, but not having others obtruded on your own view.)

Washington state is also a lousy place to start roaming.  I don't know that shoreline access is really guaranteed by English common law, which some people who discuss these things say it is.  But Washington is distinctive in that, according to Bainbridge Island journalist Christopher Dunagan, neither the courts nor the legislature have ever specifically addressed the subject.

And then there's the answer to my original question.

Who owns Seattle's streets?

I had realised, by this time, that my searches were wrong.  Searching on 'streets ownership Washington', as opposed to 'streets ownership Seattle', got me promptly to a page from the Municipal Research and Services Center, one of the public/private organisations I told you, dear Diary, about in one of the library hours pages.  Which says something I'll get to shortly, but for now let's answer the question.

"Sometimes, the municipality will own the property on a public right-of-way.  Usually, however, the property owners next to the street own the property, which usually goes to the centerline of the right-of-way, and the municipality has secured the easement for public travel."

Two references follow.  I read one, Kiely v. Graves, which says over and over things like "when a dedication specifies that property is to be used as a thoroughfare, this is strong evidence of intent to grant only an easement.". Unanimously, per the Washington Supreme Court of 2012.

OK, so the other thing the MRSC said is, "If a right-of-way has not been opened and improved, the property owner can use it like they would the rest of their property.  However, they may have to stop using it if the right-of-way is opened and improved in the future."

Nope, no trove of little-known public property here!

Implications for the shoreline street ends

What led me to start writing this page in you, dear Diary, is that I was getting ready to add the shoreline street ends to the lists and maps, and I noticed again the lack of them in most of northwest Seattle.

At first I described the shoreline street ends as following clear rules, then I found lots of exceptions, and said no, they were just a land grab.  Now I'm beginning to think that while they were certainly a land grab, they focused on an old right Washington doesn't allow, shoreline access, and they almost certainly did have clear criteria after all.

There is no undeveloped street action north of NW 57th St on North Seattle's Shilshole Bay coast.  On the Parcel Viewer, if you've panned it south along that coast, it's uninterrupted by any of the lines meaning public right of way, until 57th, where those lines jump out at you.

 

Which is, if I'm right, the criterion the city used.  Streets that stopped while their right-of-way easements continued to the water.

I'll let you know, dear Diary.  In the meantime, I have lots more mapping and listing to do, so I can hike tomorrow.  Happy days and nights until I start telling you about that, dear Diary. 

 

Under Construction, part VII: Woodland Park Before, During and After

Dear Diary,

As the title of this part implies, Woodland Park, a gigantic park in southern mid-North Seattle, has three projects listed at the two websites on which this page is based:  One done in 2025; one visibly still going; and one not yet started.

Citywide Athletics Building Restoration

You may remember, dear Diary, that thanks to a fire, the restrooms in the park's southeast corner closed.

Well, in 2025, the building got fixed.  I couldn't find any sign in the Internet Archive that the project was ever listed as upcoming - if I'd been paying attention in 2025, I'd have called this a "cowboy" project.  But on the chance that it's reasonable to think of the building as new, I took a postcard shot:

Replacing the turf on Field 1

Synthetic turf wears out, so it needs replacement every so often, as I remarked in part II of this page.

Now, Woodland Park, being so big, has basically five parts.  1) It has the city's main zoo, which dominates the park's western half, and which charges admission, one reason I've never visited.  2) South of the zoo is a big rose garden, and although roses don't excite me all that much, this garden is actually a pretty neat place, and does not charge admission.  3) In the park's northwestern corner, Woodland Park poses as an ordinary neighbourhood park, with one water fountain which I haven't visited yet this year.

The larger eastern half of the park is divided by use and by a strong gradient into the lower, eastern half, and the upper, western half.  The name "Lower Woodland Park" applies to both of these halves, because the zoo is even higher up.

4) The west has several picnic shelters, and my description of how homeless campers used these shelters in the height of the pandemic has, strangely, become one of your most popular pages, dear Diary.  This 4th part of Woodland Park also has reasonable woods to get lost in.

But all three of these projects are in Woodland Park's third claim to fame, besides the zoo and rose garden, which is 5) its unusual aggregation of athletic playfields in its lowest, easternmost, part.  Each of these fields is numbered, and the southernmost, Field 1, has been specifically blest by the Seattle Mariners, and so Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation keeps Field 1 locked up, the way a housekeeper might lock up the best china after a U.S. president had eaten from it.  Which makes it really hard for a visitor, usually arriving late in the day, and ignorant about synthetic turf, to tell when a project is going on.  I mean, Field 1 is always fenced off anyway.

But I finally decided that this photo demonstrates that the work isn't done, so this is a "during" account:

Installing turf in the infield of Field 4

Because Field 1 is so special, Woodland Park has to have a different, regular baseball diamond, for everyday use.  And because it's hypertrophic Woodland Park, it actually has four of these, Fields 3 through 6, in an arrangement formally named "Cloverleaf".  Now, I haven't investigated the other three - bad journalist, no cookie - but Field 4's infield is sand, for which the baseball technical term appears to be "grass".  So they're replacing that infield with turf, replacing "grass" without actually tearing up any plant life, so that players can use it during the many months of rain Seattle gets.

Well, two days ago I was there, and it's still all sand.  Just as I showed you, dear Diary, in part II of this page.

Neither of my photos of the construction signs shows a contractor's name.  Perhaps it's the same contractor for both jobs, and Field 4 will start when Field 1 is done.  Or maybe it seemed more reasonable to close Field 1 for a summer when it gets less use anyway, but Field 4, well, I haven't yet found it empty.  The project page hasn't been updated since March.  We'll see, I guess, dear Diary.

It's going to take me one more day to plan the baseline hikes, so there probably won't be any new parts to this page for a few days.  But tomorrow I hope to tell you, dear Diary, about a book about hiking I recently read, and about who owns the streets of Seattle.  Until then, stay happy, dear Diary. 

Under Construction, part VI: Meridian Playground Before

Dear Diary,

I've visited Meridian Playground a bunch of times, recently, waiting for the fences to go up.  I know, now, why they haven't.  But first some context.

Meridian Playground is a fairly big park between N 47th St, Meridian Ave N, the Good Shepherd Center, and N 50th St.  Unlike the past several projects I've written about, I have no real complaints with regard to this one, although this is the main project that led me to say Access is a magic word to park project managers.

"This project aims to make site improvements to the play area ...  The project also improves accessibility to the play area and restrooms.

"Most components of the play area were constructed in the early 1980s, and revised in 2002, and some equipment was replaced ... in 2011."

In other words, this is some seriously tired playground equipment, older than most of the kids' parents, and on my first visit July 23rd, it looked tired, too.

It was easy to tell which was the equipment new in 2011, too:

What I couldn't figure out, though, was how the project was going to make the playground more accessible.  See all those curbs in the foreground of this photo?  There are curbs aplenty in this place, and walls, and even stairs:

The thing that was going to serve Access was a new path between the Good Shepherd Center parking lots and the area where the playground and restrooms are.  So on July 30th, I went planning to blaze a trail through the woods, and was completely gobsmacked to discover that this path already exists.  Not least because that meant I need never have damaged my carts on the crude pavement of the N Bagley St entrance.

But here's the thing:  Most Access projects described at the parks website emphasise that standards change, and what was good enough in the 1990s isn't good enough today.  Well, but actually, I'm pretty sure that path wasn't wide enough for the 1990s either.  If you go from the park side, it's plenty wide, right up until about where the park/center boundary must be, and then it narrows drastically.  Sure, my cart would fit, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a wheelchair that would.

So even if, as it sounds like at the project page and in its linked documents (4 page PDF), they leave all those walls, curbs and stairs where they are, there's still a solid win for real access in making the restrooms wheelchair accessible.  And they're also planning to remodel the restrooms to make them work better for people with that kind of disability too.

Still ...  The Good Shepherd Center has north and south parking lots.  There are, of course, no stairs at their entrances.  But the Center warns pedestrians not to use those entrances - and of course, there are stairs at the middle path.  Three shallow steps, as if to say "No" just to be difficult.

So yes, I still think Access is a magic word for Parks project managers.

Anyway, none of that is why the project is behind schedule.  It's behind schedule because of a stupendously successful marketing campaign.

"Picnic in the Park".  Who knew?

It turns out that the Wallingford Farmers Market, held in Meridian Playground, is the closest to my house, somewhat nearer than the U-District one.  The fact that I hadn't known this, dear Diary, tells you all you need to know about how much attention I pay to farmers markets, which I could never afford in my first years in Seattle.

So there I was, on August 19th, and so were hundreds of other people, including a purely amazing number of children.  I think the average age in that park was probably not much over 20.  And that tired old playground equipment was in glory.

So I predicted then, and the project page already said before July ended, a start date of November for this project, after the market shuts down for the winter.  I don't envy the construction workers.

Well, dear Diary, I'd hoped to tell you the much more boring story of construction in Woodland Park tonight as well, but I'd better go back to real property reports instead.  Until tomorrow, then, dear Diary. 

 

 

A Foolish Mortal on Real Property Reports

Dear Diary,

I've been plugging away at my sources, compiling lists to turn into maps for my baseline hikes.  So I've been getting increasingly frustrated about the parks omitted from recent real property reports.

So frustrated that, to my considerable regret, I actually wrote an e-mail to the Real Estate Services people who compile those reports.  As an object lesson in advanced foot-in-mouth techniques, the e-mail follows, adding in [brackets] park names, plus footnotes identifying my errors.

Hello

I'm the writer of "My Seattle Parks Diary".  For information about Seattle's parks, the real property reports your office produces are a major source.  I'm extremely grateful for them.  Thank you!

However, I've long been troubled by the slimming of the report in 2021, which as far as I can now tell has not been reversed, by omitting whole categories of city real estate that weren't and apparently aren't owned, or that were collapsed into other city property.

In a post on May 3, 2021, I listed PMAs omitted:

4156 [Ingraham High School Playfield], 4167 [Cedar Park], 4442 [Laurelhurst Recreation Center] - agreements with schools

4477 [Waldo Woods] - other agreement with outsiders (and I have no idea why 4615 [Maple Springs Natural Area], also made out of easements, is still listed [A])

4450 [Bitter Lake Reservoir Open Space Park] - agreement with another city agency

3903 [Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp], 3975 [NE 60th St Park], 4010 [14th Ave NW Boat Ramp], 4011 [Fremont Canal Park], 4083 [Waterway 19], 4161 [NW 60th St Viewpoint], 4452 [Northlake Park], 4464 [Haller Lake Community Street End], 4598 [Wallingford Steps], [4599 Troll's Knoll Park ,] [B] 4619 [Gemenskap Park] - rolled into the great asset never reported, the streets [C].  In the case of 4083 this is almost certainly incorrect; the waterways are normally state property, and Waterway 19 is at the end of no street.

I understand that none of these was or is necessarily a lease (though I'd bet 4083 actually is), but leases are the easiest category to address.  Surely your office must keep track of them, and could produce a leased property report, say.  I'm currently reviving my blog after several years as a full-time student, and not knowing beans about the city's leases, after all this time, adds to my work.

Was there a good, specific reason for excluding leased property [D]?   Were the city's landlords getting harassed, say?  Or was it out of some sense that the real property report was too broad, and somehow ought to report only what the city owns, and (despite the omission of the streets [C again, dug a little deeper]) add up to a reliable total?

Thank you for your attention.

Whoosh.

A - They replied the next day, and that night, I found actual city property in Maple Springs Natural Area, in the King County Parcel Viewer, just as the real property reports say.  Oops.

B - Yes, I left one out of the e-mail.

C - I'd always assumed the city owned the streets.  Turns out this is not normally true, and I'll have more to say about this soon.  The only thing I got right about this was calling the streets a city asset.  They're easements, and so they are in fact assets, but that doesn't mean Seattle owns them.

D - The reply was kind of a work of art.  In the guise of dunderheaded obstinacy, refusing to understand my question, it casually mentioned the one clue I actually needed to see much, much more clearly.

Seattle City Council Resolution 31837 of 2018 is the fourth in a chain of resolutions concerning procedures for the disposition of city real estate, following 29799 in 1998, 30862 in 2006, and 31770 in 2017.  Unlike any of those, 31837 goes into detail about an annual report listing property owned in "fee simple", to be compiled by Real Estate Services.

The 2013 real property report, the oldest I've found, cites 29799 and 30862.  And it says "While the bulk of City property is owned in fee simple, the City also leases or obtains easement interests when appropriate.  Agreements with other public agencies provide another type of property right, e.g., the Seattle School District and Department of Parks and Recreation have agreements which provide for mutual use of certain parks and playgrounds."

What 31837 did was mandate that this report list only fee simple ownership.  Because, you see, dear Diary, the only purpose listing city real estate could possibly have is using surplus real estate for affordable housing, and leases, easements (including the streets) and agreements - none of those help with that.

Gotta love virtue signalling.

But anyway, what I'm left with is that for two years after Real Estate Services got its marching orders, it ignored them.  And if it hadn't done so, my hikes and your pages would've been much more boring.  So I'm immensely grateful to whichever bureaucratic maverick enabled me to start writing you with full information, before the burden of virtue signalling started preventing that. 

And does anyone else want Seattle to release information about its leases?

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.
  

Under Construction, part IV: Hubbard Homestead After

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry it's been so long.  I did warn you I had very busy weeks ahead, but also, enough delay meant I had to go back to some places.  For example, the work on Hubbard Homestead's basketball court was expected to be finished in late July, so although I found a fence still there August 4th, it was no big deal - except that I'd only photographed it through that fence.

 

So I went back yesterday, and I'm very glad I did, for reasons we'll get to in another page.  But anyway, replacing the fading half-court I denigrated five years ago with a fresh full court was a Good Deed for the Seattle Kraken, who work near there, to do.

But that wasn't even the main focus of the work.  As that five year old page narrated, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation tried to move an old playground from Victory Creek Park to this one, only to be shocked by the amazing discovery that old playgrounds are - yes, I know you'll find this hard to believe, dear Diary - but, yes, old playgrounds are old.  Imagine that.  So, having already promised a new playground to Victory Creek Park, which, being adjacent to a QFC, really needs one, Parks also promised a new playground to Hubbard Homestead, and the project page, which is still up, suggests that the Kraken's money is why this project is done and Victory Creek's isn't even on the list yet.

So here's some photos of the new playground, which I regret to say is not remotely too swarmed with kids for me to photograph.  There was one little boy when I took the first photo August 4th, and nobody at all yesterday.

Tomorrow, a surprise.  Until then, dear Diary.

 

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 or 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, almost every park encampment I wrote about was in a park with a restroom, which a staffer visited twice daily, and the I-5 encampments, and others remaining, had "sanican"s, which were visited less than daily. The I-5 ones had also 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 parts of "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 part of this 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.