The next several stops in my tour of city-owned properties in southern Ballard were along NW Market St, as the first set of stops had been, but what a different street: flat, and crowded. The crowds weren't so thick as to impede walking much, even given social distancing, so the flatness made a huge difference.
EDIT 5/11: Map:
Fire Station No. 18
This region's fire station is near 15th Ave NW. I didn't look closely at its door, given how many people were walking around. It was also problematic because the sun was setting, meaning photos would better be taken from the west, but for half a block west of the station door, there were fire engine access driveways. (There's no fire station in the region north of here; just two stations essentially cover all of "NW". So no wonder.) So all I did was try as best I could to take a postcard shot, which is this:
This building's predecessor is one of only three landmarks in this region.
Bergen Place
I first encountered this park right after the one next in this page, which I really like. So I was primed for disappointment, and pretty much got it, but was so disappointed that I got things wrong and had to go back to correct them. Then in the January hikes I wound up sleeping at this park in order to get to a charity that keeps rather early hours. So by this time I figured I owed it. I did what I could to take a good photograph of the art by Jenn Lee Dixon that I so dislike:
And looking around, seeing the difference from the bustle of the rest of Market St, I realised that however they may disappoint picky people like me, refuges right in the middle of the bustle are essential. So I also, near as I can remember for the first time at this park, took just a landscape shot, without a specific target:
But hey, it also helps establish that no, the department has not gone and installed a water fountain here in the past year.
Marvin's Garden
This and Bergen Place each occupy roughly half a block, at opposite ends of the block. So Marvin's Garden is maybe a hundred feet further from the bustle, and can be that much more serene. So yes, I was probably unfair to Bergen Place in the past because of that contrast, but also because Marvin's Garden is really good at serene. It dawned on me that while, in "History and Parks", part I, I had praised this park's landscape, I hadn't actually put it to the test of a photograph perpetrated by me. So I did:
And no, no new water fountain here either.
Market Street Substation Site
Well, it turns out Seattle City Light isn't do-gooding everywhere. The 2020 real property report says this site near 28th Ave NW is "Underutilized", is currently used for "Storage (Uncovered)", is planned for future use as "Microgrid", and has "Transformer & rectifier on Site". I didn't see much storage going on:
and that looks to me like plenty enough space for a bunch of tents. The transformer and rectifier are probably the equipment visible behind these stern warning signs:
and I admit some of my not-current peers are handy enough that it might be troublesome to let them camp next to those. On the other hand, the city seems quite fond of this Phoenix Patrol security company I've mentioned in connection with Laurelhurst Community Center's and Green Lake Park's restrooms; why not give them a real security job?
Northwest Senior Center
This is at the southwest corner of 32nd Ave NW and NW Market St. Near as I can tell, the city is the landlord of at least two of these; the current tenant's website sounds much more like a non-profit's than like a city website, and the addresses differ slightly, though there's only one actual door regardless. Anyway, it's a refreshingly not-fully-closed door, that:
But of course when I got there, at 7:23 P.M., it was fully closed, and though I'm ageing I'm not yet what most people consider "senior" anyway, so I went on. I passed what seemed to be several retirement-home buildings of considerable size not far from this place. If there can be only two city-supported senior centers, seems like this has become a good spot for one of them.
When I passed those buildings, I was on my way to the third-last site in this region. None is all that close to Market St, so those three sites belong to the next, and for tonight last, of these pages.
This page exists mainly because of how I got to Ballard on January 20 (correction: January 21). While there, on January 21 (hence hike 11, but correction: January 22), I took a few photos related to hygiene for homeless people such as (then) myself, but those won't take long to explain to you, and I could easily have fit them into "Hike 8C", from April 4. The hike there, however, is part of the story of how I got ready to give up homelessness, and is therefore the main topic here, and what I couldn't find a way to fit into the earlier pages.
I didn't want to go all the way downhill and south to the path I'd taken before, via Fremont and Leary Way. I had two stops to make - at the Urban Rest Stop's Ballard branch, and at Ballard Commons - both of which are in downtown Ballard. I knew I couldn't leave Green Lake and Woodland Parks via West Green Lake Way N to N 65th St, but figured I could take Green Lake Way N (note the lack of an initial direction), or maybe Aurora Ave N, I forget, south to N 46th St, and then follow that as it turned into N Market St and finally NW Market St.
The sun had already set when I started, and that's the only explanation I have for what happened next. You see, dear Diary, from about Palatine Ave N to about Baker Ave NW, along the north sidewalk of Market St, the vegetation on both sides of the sidewalk very often encroaches onto it. I walked this stretch again a week or two ago to verify by daylight, and someone has obviously cut the overgrowth back for a stretch near Palatine, but in general, it's still visible. Now, I'm out of the habit of pushing my cart, so maybe I've forgotten how wide it really is, but in any event I can't explain what I experienced that night.
Basically, I thought I was pushing my cart through a jungle that had just about engulfed the sidewalk. Most of the time, at least one back wheel was on greenery, not pavement. It was a horrible experience, made more so because under these circumstances the left back wheel found a way to overcome its construction, which should have prevented this, and come into contact with the cart's structure every time it turned, which of course both made noise and slowed me down.
Now, this particular shopping cart is wonderfully designed for homeless users, with sturdy steel spokes so the wheels can stand up to heavy use, sturdy steel frame ditto... This of course doesn't suit modern manufacturing at all, so they had to build it with planned obsolescence. After a year or so, the rivets start to come loose. But they also make the buyer spend money on it more immediately. The back wheels my first cart came with were so designed that after about 20 miles, they'd start to brush against the structure. (Replacement wheels sold separately have a simple fix to prevent this.) Also, if one uses it on four wheels, at about the same distance one of the front wheels flies off its spokes.
The back wheel problem is far more important, so on my second and third carts of this brand, the seller had installed the necessary fix up front and raised the price to compensate. This is why what the left wheel was doing was, and remains, a mystery to me. But it meant I had to run the cart on all four wheels for the hiking remaining in January, and you can probably already predict, dear Diary, what consequence that had.
Anyway, finally the overgrowth that so mystifyingly obstructed me ended, and I continued down Market. At which point I realised that I proposed to sleep in Ballard, a place whose homeless population, like its housed population, strikes me as amazingly entitled and somewhat dangerous. I finally figured maybe Marvin's Garden would be a safe place to crash.
But on the way I found Bergen Place, which I've maligned so much in the past that I had to go back to Ballard specifically to correct myself. (In "History and Parks" part II, June 25.) I'm still not crazy about it, but it has a bunch of well-spaced wooden benches, only two of which were occupied that night, and one of those people got up and left soon after I arrived. And it's sort of screened from the main street, i.e. Market St. So I settled in, ate supper, read some, and went to sleep.
So I was in position to meet the appallingly early hours kept by my first target:
The Urban Rest Stop, Ballard branch
As noted in "Hike 8C", the first time I went to Ballard on that hike, I'd dawdled too long trying to economically stimulate Fremont, and all I found was this charity location's closed doors. The resulting photo is probably as good a postcard shot as I could've taken, so I'll see if I can show it to you again here, dear Diary.
Wow, so many things about writing you are easier on a laptop than on a phone, dear Diary.
Anyway, here's a photo that shows the open door one actually finds if one gets there during its open hours:
Seemed like a nice place, but it never made sense for me to try to shower in Ballard, so I haven't had occasion to deal with it.
Ballard Commons
Ever since I'd found (in "Hike 8C") that the "Portland Loo" actually had a toilet in it, and was not just a fancier "sanican", I'd been dithering over what the word "restroom" means. I decided that one relevant issue was the sanitiser "sanican"s supply (when it hasn't been stolen). Since I've until recently always lived far east of Ballard, I've tried never to go there without more than one reason to, and this was the second reason that got me to go do justice to the Urban Rest Stop there. Does the "Portland Loo" have sanitiser?
Well, it's designed to:
I took another photo, but to be honest can't remember what it's meant to show.
Looks like I was pointing out either that the lock worked, or that it didn't. Beats me. It seems there's always a loose end after my every trip to Ballard, and this was this trip's loose end.
Anyway, dear Diary, as I said, not much to these photos. Tomorrow I'll tell you about the one area left, my home then, the near (i.e., southern) NE. And there's one park left after that. Until then, good night.
I planned this trip with a fairly simple method: having mapped all the relevant parks, I then grouped them by picking big arterial streets, and went either east to west (as in this first group, south of 55th or Market Streets) or west to east. So the next two parks (first group) represent the beginning of downtown Ballard, but I then go pretty far west (second group) before returning to downtown. This second group covers 55th/Market to 65th Streets.
Parks north of 65th place much less emphasis on history, or at least on Ballard's 18 years of independence or its settlers' Scandinavian roots. To put it another way, they're less boring than some of these.
Two small parks in south downtown Ballard
These are actually on the same block of 22nd Ave; about where the first stops, the other starts across the street. I reached them by taking Leary Way from Fred Meyer, then Ballard Ave, which meets 22nd at the first.
Marvin's Garden
This is not one of the boring ones, as long as you're careful. It's a small space stuffed to the gills with plaques, but the only ones you need to read are those identifying "Marvin":
Anyway, my guess is that the people who made this park were so obsessed with plaques that they left all the landscaping to someone or ones who knew what they were doing. So in spite of the fact that it's essentially a concrete plaza surrounded by less than fascinating plants, it has a rightness to it that money couldn't buy; not that I really know what I'm talking about, but I feel that this is a Classical garden. A big part in creating this aura is played by a bell tower:
Unfortunately, all this is a considerable contrast with
Bergen Place
I don't trust my memory when it says this has less of a plant border than Marvin's Garden, but I do believe that my initial impression was of a typical downtown windswept concrete plaza. It's meant to honour Seattle's sister city relationship with Bergen, Norway; I think I found it more crowded than such plazas usually are, but I still didn't think it did much honour. That said, the park flies the five Scandinavian flags, and I always like the surprise of seeing a non-American flag in the air:
EDIT 6/29: I saw a sixth flag from the bus today, so figured I should investigate if time allowed, which it did.
The reason this park is more popular than a typical bare windswept plaza isn't hard to find: It isn't bare. As I suspected when writing the above, I'd forgotten a plant border, sandwiched between benches and pillars, the latter topped with things I did find icky. Observe:
As for the sixth flag, I dunno. It's longer and narrower than a normal flag, and in Norwegian colours. It isn't a flag of Bergen, but could be a military or maritime variant of the Norwegian flag. I decided to make a video to make the flags clearer:
As I understand it, they are, left to right and order of focus in the video, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, uncertain.
From there I took Market St past the National Nordic Museum (and to be fair, ate lunch on a bench they provide) to the Ballard Locks (or rather their gates), but I'm saving them for two pages from now, maybe within a day or two. Our next stop also isn't a Seattle city park, but it took me a whole day to figure that out. See, I went up 32nd Ave to
A viewpoint on 60th St that is not the NW 60th St Viewpoint
There's a railing at the end of 60th - the westernmost 60th in town - and that railing affords an evidently popular but surprisingly complex view. The complexity is because you can, from that railing, see not only the water, and the Olympic Mountains across it, but also the much nearer Burlington Northern Railroad. Oh, and northernmost Magnolia. So I took four pictures. The train:
The Olympics behind the train:
Magnolia behind the train:
And the Olympics without the train:
Next I hiked back to 32nd and south to 58th and
Thyme Patch Park
This is a small, pleasant place, shady in a summer afternoon, where I caught up on my notes and rested. It has no plumbing except that required by the P-Patch. It has two styles of art, and for once the one I liked is the one credited. Roses added to the entry rails by Chuck Nafziger:
(The other art is goofy-looking frogs.)
A hop and a skip away, at 60th and 28th Ave,
Ballard Playground and Community Center
This is one of only two Community Centers in "NW" - the other is in the next page, which I probably can't write in you, dear Diary, today. In contrast, "NE" has six. ("N" has two.) Two of "NE"'s (Laurelhurst and Magnuson) and both of "NW"'s have external restrooms, as does Green Lake in "N". (I plan to reach Bitter Lake, the other "N", later in this trip.) Of "NE"'s two, Magnuson's are seasonal and weren't open when last I checked; I've found all the other external restrooms open. (A revisit to Magnuson is for later in this trip.) Is anything wrong with this picture?
Anyway, yes, Ballard Community Center has two restrooms open, I think ungendered, one of which has a working dryer. The double water fountain nearby was not running, even though it's this set's westernmost; that remains true the rest of the way north. So no, I haven't really found a western border to the dryness, just an isolated western working fountain, like Burke-Gilman Playground Park's in the east. (As I write this, not having bought and carried a gallon jug, I'm parched.)
Ballard Playground is, as usual, proudest of its playground. I liked both a formal sculpture by Chuck Greening, "Ballard Boat", and an uncredited piece of playground equipment behind it in this shot:
(The piece I like is the tall one I see as black with white polka dots in the photo.)
Improvements planned seem not to have universal approval:
Ballard Commons
Despite the famous sweep at a time of no sweeps, the first thing I saw of Ballard Commons both times I went there (along 57th St) was a tent. And if Gilman Playground got the best of those swept, those who stayed put or have returned can't be too far from the worst. On each visit a loud dispute broke out shortly after I arrived. Why do they stay in such an inauspicious place? One reason might be that it has a triple, running water fountain.
The park's biggest claim to fame is, believe it or not, the "Portland Loo", in other words, a "sanican" variant identified with another city. There are also three more conventional "sanicans", and two hand-washing stations besides that built into the "Loo", which was out of water while I was there. I don't get it. First you design a park - a classic downtown windswept concrete plaza, at that, a design notorious for repelling the housed - to attract the homeless, and then when we show up you kick us out?
So iIt does have a skatebowl, and the seashell sculptures through which, in other years, water flows for play, are cute:
Also, when SPL stopped offering Wi-Fi at Ballard, I started being notified of a "Ballard Commons Free Wi-Fi". But I never got it to work, and it's the opposite of communal anyhow.
Interested people are aware of what one might call the site's terrible feng shui. They want to add a playground, and that would probably help.
But it might not, with an existing playground so close. And I'm not sure you can sidestep a place's essence. Ballard Commons is downtown. Shouldn't it have something less common? My thought was a bandstand, not just a literal stand but with outlets for electronic equipment, and maybe a well-built shed for a piano. Well, whatever; it's not really my business.
But if you want the homeless out of Ballard Commons, give us water supplies elsewhere, for Heaven's sake.
Ballard Corners Park
This small park is at 17th Ave and 62nd St. It basically features two sculptural re-creations of mid-20th Century life, with a very short trail between. The park is where an old convenience store used to be, of the kind I can remember from my own early childhood elsewhere, and the park is very proud of Nathan Arnold's soda counter. But if you approach from the south, you'll see Arnold's other sculpture first, and I won't spoil the surprise.
Gemenskap Park
One aspect of Seattle's current mayor's administration that's been surprisingly little discussed is her revival of former mayor Mike McGinn's road diets, which in his hands were hugely controversial. Admittedly, the most obvious example is quite recent, so there hasn't been time for full-blown hysteria; I mean, of course, the "Stay Healthy" streets.
But here's another. This one is actually a literal McGinn legacy: the planning began in his term, burbled along under the intervening mayors, and the park opened in 2018 under the current mayor. Basically, Gemenskap Park is two lanes subtracted from 14th Ave between 59th and 61st Streets and turned into a park. It's essentially grass in one lane and a wide promenade in the other, and the night I visited was very popular.
All for now, dear Diary. My feet are killing me from standing typing, and I need to find things to drink. I should next have Wi-Fi when I reach the Broadview branch of the library, luck and SPL willing, and then be writing at a steady clip when I return to campus.
