Whew! Almost done. Just some hiking along Shilshole...
EDIT 5/11: Map:
Well, but first, an old friend.
Salmon Bay Phase I and
Salmon Bay Phase II
We've encountered this pleasant place at least twice before, dear Diary: in "The Ballard Seacoast", part I, as Salmon Bay Natural Area; then in "Street Ends: Shilshole Bay", as the 34th Ave NW Street End. Now above we see its name, or rather names, in the 2020 real property report.
Yet another photo of the place:
And I thought I'd photographed its signage before, but if so, I haven't showed it to you, dear Diary, so here it is:
It was fairly crowded, and I was worried about sunset coming, so I set off again. The next two stops are also street ends, and are ten blocks apart each.
But I got distracted along the way. At 30th, by the entrance to
The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and Carl S. English Jr Botanical Garden
Well, even before that, I had another try at photographing one of the tall reddish conifers that I suspect of being redwoods:
But then at the gate at 30th, I was gobsmacked to find it open. Turns out it's back to regular hours:
and if the city ever slows down in the mistreatment of my former and perhaps future peers, so I can spare the time, I'd really like to go back there, tour the place, and tell you all about it, dear Diary.
Last time I visited the 28th Ave NW street end (as recounted in "Street Ends: North-west Salmon Bay"), there was a homeless madwoman there, and I complained that she'd obstructed my photography, so I considered trying again. But there was another young woman there this time, and although she was to all appearances sane (and housed), I just put it off again.
Ship Canal Water Quality Project
Do you remember, dear Diary, how (in the same previous page), under the influence of a false understanding of street ends, I professed uncertainty in identifying the 24th Ave NW street end? Well, it turns out the alternative I thought was probably wrong was actually spectacularly wrong. The building uphill from the actual street end, adjacent to the supposed one, is apparently the headquarters of the whole tunnel-building project. And its backyard is yet another of the construction sites.
I was dithering about what to photograph when I noticed two geese:
and decided to get out of their way, after taking one photo to prove I'd been there:
Now, near as I can tell, there's been a vast amount of street work going on in Ballard to fix the "missing link" of the Burke-Gilman Trail. So I decided to try to take the Trail from this site to the last one, instead of Shilshole. That worked out poorly; I probably wasn't on the actual trail, but anyway came up to a fence that sternly warned against trespassing on the gravel wasteland beyond, as if anyone would want to. Suddenly Shilshole, right next door, seemed much more appealing.
Shilshole Ave NW itself is actually not that bad, if one knows in advance that all the sidewalks are on the north side of the street. It's just that it's usually unpleasant before one gets onto it, and it's usually unpleasant after one leaves it, too, walking in the street, on gravel, into oncoming cars' paths, and other nuisances. This time my negative thoughts as I left Shilshole turned toward the fact that I'd lately kept running into geese, but never ducks any more. Had we humans just gotten too obtrusive again, and all the ducks I'd seen last year had gone into hiding? As I thought this, I am truly not making this up, I noticed someone yelling rather loudly ahead of me, over and over, and as I came closer the yells sounded more and more like quacks, and lo:
This particular duck was genuinely aggravated about something, and wouldn't let me get any closer, but I was still thrilled to see it, and continued in a much more cheerful frame of mind to my last stop:
14th Ave NW Boat Ramp
This park hasn't had a "sanican" like its peer on Sunnyside Ave N in the past, and it hasn't acquired one either, let alone a water fountain:
I told you, dear Diary, much too long ago now, that I had errands in Ballard. They were both in the shopping along Leary, and I'd run one before going north to Greg's Garden and Gilman Playground. The other was getting groceries at Fred Meyer, and so, having as it turned out beaten sunset by fifteen minutes, I turned to grocery shopping, and getting home in the much greater cold than when I'd set out, and other things that you, as my parks diary, needn't hear about.
It'll be a little while before my next hike. Happy days until then, dear Diary.
All three of this page's street ends are actually publicly accessible. Um, for some value or other of "accessible". One even offers the first near-shore seating since Fremont Canal Park, rather far southeast. So let's get started!
11th Ave NW Street End
My notes call this "a really neat micro-park". The only sour note for me was that it was so popular, I had to hang around for some time to take photos without people in them. Such a terrible fate.
Photo 1 - The street that ends
That's the park on the right.
Photos 2 - The land the city appears to claim
That's the seating, some of it, in blue.
Photo 3 - A view over the water - well, sort of
14th Ave NW Street End (14th Ave NW Boat Ramp)
Photo 1
No, identifying a "street end" here makes no more sense than it did on Sunnyside Ave N. Less, in fact, since that really is 14th Ave NW, the one that goes all the way to 65th, not just some vague continuation of it as at Sunnyside, that crashes into the water there. But there are no Cheshiahud Loop consultants here to give a second opinion.
I probably should have taken a picture of the view there, but I was rightly worried about space on my phone, and my notes say nothing about it.
15th Ave NW (Ballard Bridge) Street End
Unless I'm badly mistaken, one of the city colleges has a program in merchant marine, and they have it on the coast to one side of the bridge. One of this program's main products seems to be fences.
This being a bridge, there is no photo 1.
Photo 2
Photo 3
No, really, my notes claim that's a view over water from the Ballard Bridge street end.
But they also claim an alternative theory under which one can reach the fences even sooner. There are two narrow streets running parallel to the bridge, one on each side. Helpfully, at least the one east of the bridge has the name, I am not making this up, "15th Ave NW".
Photo 1
Well, dear Diary, I'll tell you a secret. All seven of the remaining street ends, those west of here, really are publicly accessible. I have to charge my phone, and then I'll tell you all about them.
Monday June 22 I went from Fremont, which treasures quirk, to Ballard, which treasures history. Ballard used to be a separate city (for 18 years) until it agreed to annexation by Seattle, and it never lets the visitor to its parks forget it. (To be fair, though, most of this insistence is in parks I don't get to until the next page.)
Anyway, I've been very liberal with photos this trip, and I was worried some would disappear, as they sometimes do when my camera gets crowded, so I tried to post that night. Unfortunately, the Ballard public library turned out to treat internet access the way many public buildings treat electricity - free inside, but forbidden out. So here I am at the Greenwood branch days later with a huge backlog, and I'll just have to see how far I can get. I probably won't fully catch up for days to come.
After the Fremont Canal Park below, everything address-wise is "NW" for pages and days to come. Other things I encountered less constantly, but still many times every day: crows that disapproved of my existence, and would chase me for a block or two to tell me about it; and winds that disapproved of my taking notes on paper, and scattered those notes so many times that last night (June 24) my inseam split on my 854th retrieval dive. Finally, until I say otherwise, you have to assume that I saw my peers, at and between many of the "NW" parks; it would be invidious to call out all the campers, so I only mention my fellow homeless when I have a point to make.
I EDITED this page Sunday June 28 on looking at my receipts and finding I'd misreported my grocery shopping.
I EDITED it again Monday June 29 on revisiting Sunset Place and probably Cascade Place.
First a leftover from Sunday night.
The Burke-Gilman Trail
It didn't occur to me until I experienced it that because the trail goes under bridges, it offers the chance to watch them split from below. Not actually as impressive a sight as watching that mountain of bridge rise in front of you when you're on it, but maybe interesting still.
A. B. Ernst Park
This hasn't closed for its expansion construction yet, but the writing is literally on the wall:
The fence shown there doesn't block the trail yet, but it will - construction is planned for August. The sign includes a map:
This makes it clear that the existing park's dubious main attraction, some Brutalist concrete benches, will not survive in its present form. Now, I've never seen that thing as "neat stuff", but I have no objection to documenting something soon to go, so:
Apparently when they're done the trail will go all the way down, no stairs needed, so I'm altogether happy.
The non-Jurassic parts of Fremont Canal Park
Apparently they squeeze the Fremont Fair into here every year, so talking about this park is probably coals to Newcastle, but anyway there's something sort of neat. There are four odd pieces of furniture along the park's length, at least one in the "NW" part. Three of them, including the "NW" one, are surrounded by bushes, as if to disguise them as incipient topiary.
And one is a chess bench. I have something of a soft spot for chess benches; one of my last student newspaper stories was about them. More precisely, about what proved a successful attempt to destroy a chess community by splitting its benches up, so it's kind of perverse of me to highlight this solitary one, but anyway, a chess bench disguised as topiary:
Fremont Canal Park gives every sign of abandoning parkness for trailness well before its notional end at 3rd Ave NW, but if you stick it out that far, you can go straight up 3rd to:
Ross Park
This park is three blocks west of Fremont Peak Park, and probably about three blocks down from it. It's the only park in this page that isn't open 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M.; Ross keeps the less common 6 A.M. to 10 P.M. schedule. There's some dispute about the name. The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation website calls it "Ross Playground". The park's scoreboard calls it "Ross Playfield":
But I'm going with the park's main sign:
Anyway, this was my first stop with a restroom. The water fountain wasn't working, of course, but the restroom worked fine. (I won't be saying that about most "NW" park restrooms.)
One bit of neat stuff is in the playground, which sort of successfully carries through the spider theme suggested:
But there's something neater between the restrooms, a mosaic whose makers' names I haven't found:
From there I continued on 3rd to...
A small neighbourhood with four very small parks
The neighbourhood is one I'd glimpsed, because it's just west of Woodland Park Zoo. The first park I reached is
Sunset Place
This is a triangle, a rather tall one with some benches at the top to take in whatever view can be had at 1st Ave and 52nd St. My first reaction on seeing it was "What a good use of space!", and I stand by that. But I didn't climb up to the benches, which was apparently foolish of me, because the parks department website seems to say there's a water fountain there. Sorry!
EDIT June 29: OK, now I have. And there is indeed a water fountain up there, a bizarrely familiar elementary school model, but it RUNS! This means all three working water fountains in "NW" are south of 60th St. Sorry, I didn't taste the water. But here's a picture of the fountain and the park:
This turnaround island at the end of Palmer Court NW is in Ballard just west of NW Market St at NW 52nd St.
manages to get at most two things right. This park was the subject of the first question I addressed to Rachel Schulkin, Communications Manager for the department. (I'd tried to reach her before but never gotten an answer; this turned out to be because I hadn't asked specific questions.) Anyway, she answered but didn't sound certain; going by her answer, it does exist, it is at an end of Palmer Court, and it is technically in Ballard. It is not, however, a turnaround island, near 52nd St, or just west of Market St. I took a bunch of pictures. First, the situation. Palmer Court is a short gravel street that heads southeast from 2nd Ave some feet south of 52nd St. The address given by the department, not that those are always reliable, puts Cascade Place at the interior end, where there's no turnaround island, but is a bunch of greenery. This is where Google Maps and Ms. Schulkin say it is. Presumably it's a different part of this greenery from this one:
I also took pictures of both ends of Palmer Court:
and of 52nd St just west of Market St (specifically, Baker Ave and 52nd)
just to show the absence of traffic islands.
EDIT 6/29: On the premise that the park, if it exists, must be at the interior end of Palmer Court, I took a video of that end today. I think the likeliest candidate for parkhood is whatever is at the top of the low steps seen in the video, but given the "PRIVATE PROPERTY" sign and a loudly barking large dog nearby, I thought there was too much chance someone with a shotgun was what's at the top of those steps. Anyway, the video:
Rainier Place
This triangle is where 53rd St intersects with 54th St, I am not making this up. The department website gets only one thing wrong, calling it "grassy". It is dominated by a conifer tree whose generic name I should but don't know, and the needles discourage grass from most of the space.
Greenwood Triangle
This triangle is at 3rd Ave and 55th St, strictly speaking across the street from the weirdly laid out small neighbourhood, and actually is grassy.
Next west on Market up to 9th Ave.
Gilman Playground
This extends from 54th past 53rd, but private houses fill half the second block; it runs one long block from 9th to 11th Avenues. At 4 acres it's bigger than Ross (2.35) let alone the others. So it has a restroom and water fountain, but here's what's strange: both work! I was so gobsmacked I took pictures to establish a chain of evidence. Working water fountain:
That water fountain is near this restroom:
And that restroom is in Gilman Playground:
You see, I'd gone on a quest for the hypothetical western boundary of the dry park water fountain problem, and I'd found it! Admittedly, at the westernmost park water fountain in that part of town, but you can't have everything. (Remember, I hadn't yet found the water fountain at Sunset Place.)
The men's room has a lockable door, but no dryer.
By far the neatest thing I saw Monday at Gilman Playground was an absence. There were a lot of tents in the park, and some visibly homeless people (including me) outside them. There were also a lot of visibly housed people there. And they were all minding their own business. It was such a refreshing change from the usual park interactions within either group or between the groups. I concluded that when Ballard Commons was swept not long ago, all the best-behaved of my peers had come to Gilman Playground, but I sure don't know why the housed were behaving so well.
I eventually decided to photograph some drums in the playground. Plastic, they aren't loud, just audible enough to get across the acoustics lesson of differently sized instruments:
From Gilman Playground I went to the nearby Safeway and got the day's groceries, about which I'll talk more when posting about the 23rd. But then I headed south for one more park, dear Diary, after which I have to stop writing you for a while, but I'll try to return today. This is the 14th Ave NW Boat Ramp, and isn't close to any other parks. Unlike the Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp, it had no "sanican" that day. I took a picture of its seascape:
Then, having done Number One at both Ross and Gilman, I discovered an urgent need to do Number Two. So I went to Fred Meyer, and paid for the use of their restroom (which also lacked drying capacity at the time) by buying a map of the Eastside there.
Next page, today, I hope, covers downtown Ballard.
