Bryant Playground and View Ridge Playfield Tonight

Dear Diary,

Three weeks ago I walked to the Seattle Public Library's Northeast branch to borrow some Korean TV dramas, and tonight I walked back to return them.  Helpfully, the library was closed tonight when I got there - no, I don't memorise all these hours I tell you about, dear Diary, any more than anyone else does.  Last time I tried to find the parks nearby, but got confused, and by the time I'd vaguely remembered where they were, I was too tired to visit them.  Tonight, though, with no distractions in the library, it was earlier, and I had the sense to consult a map.

So.

Bryant Playground's water fountain is running.  A man was playing basketball with, I assume, his daughter when I got there, which led me to entertain speculations about social distancing, but they were on the far end of the court by the time I made it down the hill to the fountain.  The water tasted slightly off.

View Ridge Playfield's water fountain that was removed, in the words of one of its visitors, "to not spread germs", has not been returned.

Its other water fountain, which is down a grassy slope, is running, and tastes more than slightly off.

View Ridge Playfield's restrooms were, I was told when you were a few months old and parks employees were speaking with me fairly often, open 24 hours for years without any publicity.  I was worried that by giving them publicity through you, dear Diary, I would give the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation an excuse to start closing them.  But at least tonight at 8:04 P.M. they were open:

So that's good.

I've emphasised the downhills for a reason.  Unless the Dahl Playfield water fountain, out of order so long the parks department page for that park doesn't list it as an amenity, has been fixed, the only park in that general area with a street-level water fountain working is Ravenna-Eckstein, way at the southwest corner of a pretty large stretch of land.  View Ridge's removed water fountain was street level, relatively accessible to people with mobility difficulties; the one currently working, surrounded by grass, isn't accessible at all, and the one at Bryant, down and then up a steep hill, isn't well accessible.  What does the parks department have against providing water to people with mobility difficulties in the middle of northeast Seattle?

(I assume some fountains are currently working in Magnuson Park, but none of Magnuson Park is street-level to much of anywhere other than Sand Point Way.  Maybe I should count Burke-Gilman Playground Park, though, in which case the objection is similar to that against Ravenna-Eckstein:  it's way far south.)

The Seattle Times reports tonight that what has been described as the last major encampment in a Seattle park, at Woodland Park, has been cleared.  What with the things I do to deal with their paywalls, I haven't read the article yet, but I suspect that however pretty a face the city puts on this, there will be woe and sorrow for some of my former peers tonight.  But you know, dear Diary, if homeless people aren't miserable, mayors can't sleep well.  So we'll see what our new mayor, supposedly sympathetic to the homeless people he grew up alongside, comes up with next to spread doom and gloom among the poor, now that clearing the parks is at least temporarily off his agenda.

All the photos are at the Google Drive folders, View Ridge and Bryant.

Good night, dear Diary.  I'm still focused on things Korean, but today wrote about a private library, and hope to finish with those sometime within the next week or two.  I'll actually probably be writing more about parks sooner than that.  Until then, happy nights and happy days.

Details of southern NE Seattle, part II

Dear Diary,

This page is for the rest of yesterday's hike.  As in previous pages, photos of open or closed restroom doors (actually, open for the remaining parks), and running or inert water fountains (actually, inert for the remaining parks), are in a public folder at my Google Drive, URL:

<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cfrNdJI9NVY3ux7OoGI7B8Vg3Klq3liT?usp=sharing>

Also, as in all the hikes with these boring page titles, I tried to remember to test each restroom I could legitimately enter by drawing water in the sink and trying to make it splash me, then trying to use any dryer available to dry off.  I only mention these tests when I forgot them, or when either sink, dryer or both behaved badly.

Christie Park

Last year, this expanded park opened with a running water fountain.  This year it's more ordinary.

It's quite a long way to the next park - Christie Park is at 9th Ave NE and NE 43rd St, Laurelhurst Playfield at 45th to 48th Avenues NE and NE 41st to 45th Streets.  So I digressed quite a bit along the way.

First I went to

University Temple

This building, besides being a church, hosted an amazing number of non-profits, including the Roots shelter for young homeless people.  Since Roots offered showers, eventually it also hosted the University District location of the Urban Rest Stop.  It's a gorgeous old building, and I'm kind of amazed it didn't get landmarked as a way to stop its demolition, but while photographs of it are fairly numerous online, photos of the board on NE 43rd St that listed all the non-profits, which I found almost as inspiring as the soaring steeple, don't seem to be online.  I'll put one here if I'm still able.

Anyway, it's been fenced in, though it's not yet the pile of rubble I predicted in April it would take for certain parties to admit that it's gone.

Here's the Urban Rest Stop's doorway, still standing but no longer accessible for the four shower rooms and one additional restroom still offered by the charity's website (though at least they no longer pretend that this location has a meaningful calendar, as they did until recently; unfortunately, the Internet Archive doesn't preserve the calendar, and I wasn't mean enough to take a screenshot) - um, right, and also still offered by the lying map I spent January hiking to check.  As I said, here's that doorway:

And here's the water fountain I treated as a street fountain, but which is obviously on private property, and probably a private fountain offered by this very long generous church.  The fountain lacked a drainpipe all last year, but still ran until winter.

The University of Washington Campus

This is where I spent most of my days, and many of my nights (awake) from September 2014 to February 2020, mostly indoors during the days and evenings.  I also spent most of my days and quite a few of my nights (awake and asleep) here from April 2020 to January 2021, when not hiking for you, dear Diary, or for my own survival, mostly outdoors at all times.  I looked at both the benches on which I spent most of the latter months, but was much more interested in the five buildings through which I could spend 365 days per year inside.  None of those buildings is yet admitting the general public.  Two are clearly open to random undergrads - Suzzallo Library and the Husky Union Building.  The latter is also open to invited members of the general public, and perhaps to customers (with appointments) of the few open businesses.  One of the buildings I haven't publicly named is open to students who have specific business there, through faculty members' intervention.  The other two (Savery Hall and the other I haven't named) are officially not open at all, which means they're open to those who have offices in them.

I'm going to steal a punchline from what I'd intended to be one of your last pages, dear Diary, because in the present situation it's morally unconscionable to continue to keep this to myself.  The UW campus's outdoors is largely a cascade of parks, interrupted mostly by buildings and parking lots, but despite the huge area covered when one adds all these parks up, it's like all other private parks known to me in North Seattle.  It offers no restrooms with doors that open to the outside, and no outdoor water fountains.  It should be ashamed of itself, what with the vast amount of construction it's been doing during this pandemic, that it has done nothing to change that.  I'm told that bags full of human Number Two can often be found in an underground parking area as a result.

I have to qualify this punch line a slight bit.  East of Sakuma Viewpoint, at Brooklyn Ave NE and NE Boat St, which the University claims as a park and the City claims as a street end, is a restaurant called Agua Verde Cafe.  Back behind this restaurant are its restrooms, which have doors that open to the outside.  They also have locks, which are the push-button kind.  Employees reputedly have to escort people to those restrooms, and when I first went there, the restaurant was closed for the holidays.

The doors were definitely locked on December 22, when I took those photos.  I haven't gone there since, not even yesterday, although since it's possible that they prop the doors open while the restaurant is open (unlikely though that seems), I should get back there and find out.

Also on campus, northeast of there, is a golf driving range, which doesn't have a website.  It's near the intersection of Canal Road and Clark Road.  When this is open, it is open to the public (unlike most of the UW's athletic facilities), and that includes its restrooms, whose doors open to the inside.  It was open last summer, much of which I spent near it on the East Campus, although I never actually used those restrooms.  However, it was closed all last winter, which is when I mainly hiked the campus, and this month it's open only four days per week, Thursday through Sunday.  It also keeps approximately business hours.  I have no photos yet.

I've found nothing else on the UW campus.

Laurelhurst Community Center and Playfield

None of the three water fountains in the Playfield were running yesterday.

The restrooms in the Community Center, with doors that open to the outside, each have one toilet, one sink, one dryer, one soap dispenser, and no urinal.  The doors can only be locked through the push buttons in the door knobs; the apparent bolts above those do nothing.  (Yes, I used these.  I hadn't, after all, been near an open restroom I could acceptably enter since lunch.)

The Laurelhurst Community Center's doorway signage hasn't yet changed since last year:

I'd remembered complaining to you, dear Diary, sometime last year, that I could never get from Magnuson Park to University Playground and all the rest of the parks then local to me (including this one, actually closest to where I then slept) in one day, that is, within the restroom open hours.  I can't find that line now, and did find that I'd done exactly that April 24, as reported in "Magnuson Park: Things We've Lost, part I" and "Our Main Characters".  With my cart, that time.  But I didn't remember that then, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself for having finished the day's task early (5:30 P.M.) despite all the digressions.  I'd been wondering if I could finish the four parks of the 60s and 70s as well, thus making the last hike almost a formality, and decided "Yes, I can!"

So I hightailed it north to, um,

SUN Park

The name of this park is an acronym for a twee slogan; that's why it's capitalised.  Last year it was a private park which I used to introduce the two "Ballard Seacoast" pages, but according to the City of Seattle's 2021 Real Property Report (PDF) it's now an official Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park, although it doesn't have any official signage yet.  It fits somewhat awkwardly among the official parks of North Seattle, because it's mostly a demonstration garden, like the Center for Urban Horticulture at the UW (about a mile from this park), or parts of the Woodland Park Rose Garden - one not a Seattle park, the other under private management.  But it does already have one parkish amenity:

Unsheltered benches!  (OK, I'm not sure the log in the middle photo is meant as a bench, but the other two certainly are.)  Maybe officialness will bring others - a trash can?  A water fountain?  Naah, that's way too much to hope for.

Anyway, after that brief break, I really did hurry north to

Bryant Playground

Let me shorten this a bit:  I've still never seen any water fountain at any of these four parks, the only four parks with water fountains in a fairly wide area, produce water, and that includes last night.

View Ridge Playfield

This one's restrooms are unofficially, but for years now, open 24 hours, so I wasn't surprised to find them open.  I was surprised I was able to find where the main water fountain used to be (this photo is at the Google Drive folder):

It was between the restrooms and the water area of the playground.  It was removed, according to one of the mothers I spoke with at the playground last May, when the removal was recent, "to not spread germs".

This, and the rush I was in, distracted me from my usual check of the men's room.  However, I spent a fair amount of time at this park last year between July (when my phone was stolen) and November (when I got UW Wi-Fi for my new phone), getting Wi-Fi by day at the Northeast branch of the Seattle Public Library, using the men's room here, and sleeping at one or the other.  From that, I'm pretty certain this park's men's room has one toilet without a stall door, one urinal with its own stall (not sure about how wide it is), one sink, one dryer, one soap dispenser; the sink doesn't usually splash my clothing and the dryer worked last time I used it.

Anyway, onward I trudged.  One big difference the cart makes is that hills are much easier to take, such as the hill along 30th Ave NE.

Dahl Playfield

The men's room here has a profound privacy problem, and when it's hosed down, the water pools around the sink to several inches' depth.  The rest of the park is a playfield, and I've had to work pretty hard to find anything to like about it.

But that's because I hadn't bothered to look at the playground yet.  There's a genuinely cool stone garden of sorts near it.

Anyone who happens to be around 25th Ave NE and NE 77th St should definitely take a look at it.

The Dahl Playfield men's room, which was still open a few minutes before 7 P.M., has one toilet without a stall door, one urinal, one sink, one soap dispenser, and no dryer.

Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center and Park

The Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center has the same excuse for not informing anyone of anything that the Green Lake and Magnuson ones do - construction - but here, as at Magnuson, they chose otherwise.

However, none of these signs yet address the possibility of re-opening.

All for now, dear Diary.  I think it's probably already too late to go to the remaining three parks, and tomorrow it's supposed to be pouring rain, so we'll see when I can get to those.  Until then, happy days and good nights.

Water Fountains - an Interim Report, Part II

Dear Diary,

The last page I wrote in you re-introduced in some detail, by location, characteristics, and where I'd written about them before, sixteen water fountains and what I found of them on a mostly night hike September 17.  This page reports on eleven of those fountains as seen again September 28.  None had changed status, among on, off or damaged.

September 28

As on the 17th, a hike from the Northeast branch of the Seattle Public Library to the UW campus, but this time mostly by day, with a somewhat better charged phone, so I could take some pictures.  It was still way too hot for me for hiking, so I only reached eleven of the sixteen fountains covered on the 17th, and wound up in a different part of campus.  I took some pictures for specific reasons, but mainly in a misguided attempt to convey how I saw the northern parks, of which I've shown you, dear Diary, few pictures so far.  It seems I see mainly grass in them.  Sorry.

Dahl Playfield - NOT RUNNING

Although on this visit I actually found some neat stuff here - a sort of micro-scale woods with a path through it - I definitely see this park mainly as big grassy swards meant for athletic use, so this time I wanted a picture of grass:

Ravenna-Eckstein Park - Probably NOT RUNNING, but officially DANGEROUS, believe it or not:

I think of this park as crowded with features that usually in turn crowd it with people.  I have no idea how trying to photograph that without including the people got me so much grass:

Bryant Playground - NOT RUNNING

I think of this park as topographically challenged:

View Ridge Playfield - NOT RUNNING

Of course, I went to the spot from which I once shot a night view to shoot a day one:

Enough of that.  The two remaining parks in this page, you've already, dear Diary, seen in plenty of photos.  I still took some in Magnuson Park, but not in Laurelhurst Playfield.  I also took one on the way.  Since my previous trip's route to Magnuson Park, along 65th St, had resulted in wailing and lamentation, I tried 75th St this time, and thus found another park not Parks', near 50th Ave.  This is a Seattle Public Utilities site across 75th from the Sand Point Country Club.  For some reason they've gone to a lot of trouble to gussy it up, but have then slapped a fence around most of it:

Of course there were also tears and the gnashing of teeth along this route - not on 75th, and not in the neighbourhood of switchbacks between 75th and Sand Point Way, but rather in the epic struggle to walk the three blocks from 77th to 74th Sts along Sand Point, a part of it not designed for the human form.

But in the fullness of time, yea, I reached

Magnuson Park

Playground fountain - NOT RUNNING

I still haven't seen the restroom more or less tied to this fountain - though actually pretty far away - open, though in fairness I also haven't looked during calendrical summer.  Yet another door shot:

Central fountain - ON; a shot of it overshooting its bowl:

Beach fountain - ON; a shot of the adjacent shower:

Southern fountain - has gone from USABLY to UNUSABLY DAMAGED.  A shot; if you compare it to the one from April, the main difference is a white part you can see in that shot, but not below:

Finally,

Laurelhurst Playfield - all fountains ON

My phone was by then really low on power, and by the time I'd rested, night was falling, so I left and ended the hike.

Next part, probably this evening, downtown and Capitol Hill.

Home Dry Home

Dear Diary,

Today I finished visiting the nearby parks with water fountains.  For some I had more specific goals, but in general I wanted to get up to date on their water fountains and, where applicable, their restrooms, and also wanted to take some pictures.

The only change since the last time I did this is one I've taken for granted, in writing in you, for weeks, dear Diary.  This is that the restrooms in upper Ravenna Park have gone from usually locked, sometimes open 24 hours, to normal park restrooms, open reasonably early, closed far too early.  Otherwise, the three remaining locked restrooms (in Cowen and Magnuson Parks and in University Playground) remain locked, all the rest are open, and hardly any water fountains are running.

The first day, I got up and went, as usual,to

Burke-Gilman Playground Park

This is a smallish park (7 acres) which is nevertheless in three parts.  The one I've focused on has the restrooms (open) and water fountain (running; my main water source for the past two months) as well as a playground and the "neat stuff" I've posted pictures of already.  This time I wanted to replace the "door shots" that early in you, dear Diary, provided evidence of restrooms open or closed, with shots meant to document how much privacy the men's rooms' users could expect.  BGPP is by this standard mediocre:  the only toilet stall has a heavy door which stays closed when pulled to, but can't be latched, let alone locked; there's no sign the existing door ever had such features.

The men's room also is still out of soap; it's now been over a week.

I also wanted to flip my previous standard for "neat stuff", that it be near the restrooms.  So I looked for "neat stuff" elsewhere, and in BGPP that means the other two parts.  This park has a ravine:

which is actually where I first looked for the restrooms, even though its trail is gravel.  So this park also taught me what I wrote a while ago, that parks normally don't try to hide their plumbing.

After breakfast, I travelled on

The Burke-Gilman Trail

I normally don't mention this, but it is in fact technically a Seattle park, and as I mentioned some time ago, it does have a (badly damaged) water fountain that I've photographed several times already.  Here's yet another:

Someone has tried to console the thirsty with candy.

I usually turn shortly after this fountain to go to Safeway (yes, the one that was attacked two days ago, though I didn't know that then).  From there I took 45th to

Laurelhurst Community Center and Playfield

This park is twice the size of BGPP and much more sports-oriented.  The restrooms are built into the community center, but open to the outside; they have many little features more typical of building than of field restrooms, of which the most important by far is that the sinks give hot water.  The two rooms are single-user and all-gender.  They have two visible locking mechanisms.  The one that looks like a deadbolt does nothing; I don't know whether the one included in the latch works, or whether these doors latch but don't lock.

The three water fountains are near the tennis courts and behind the two baseball diamonds.  I've yet to find any of them running.

At the far end of the park from the restrooms is a bridge, whose whole purpose, I suspect, is to allow kids from Laurelhurst Elementary to reach the park without crossing a street:

After eating lunch and (ah, luxury) washing my deli container, I took that bridge to 47th Ave, and that north to Sand Point Way, which I left at 65th for

Magnuson Park

This is one of Seattle's largest parks, though the effect is a little vitiated by its northwestern part being heavily built up.  It has three existing pairs of restrooms, a derelict building that used to host another pair, and three spots where an old map claims restrooms once were.  Here I failed to find "neat stuff" far from the restrooms.  I thought of Promontory Point, but it's actually pretty dull, except for its views of Lake Washington:

which of course also exists close to the "beach" restrooms.

North along the shore from the Point, the derelict restroom building's leak has been stopped.  The water thus saved has not been put into any of the park's four water fountains known to me.

Further north are the beach restrooms.  The stalls in these (I ventured to glance into the women's room) look like they had doors, which have been removed.  The dryer in the men's room still doesn't work.

My other failure to find "neat stuff" far from these restrooms is "Fin Art", a sculpture field (by John T. Young) mainly north of them, but reaching far enough south to be seen from them:

Going west on the Cross Park Trail, we get to the central restrooms.  I see no evidence that the stalls in the men's room here ever had doors:

Further west, near the entrance, is another set, still locked:

I recently compiled a list of North Seattle community centers, and was surprised to have ignored one in Magnuson Park.  It turns out to have been the building those restrooms are in, "The Brig", so although I didn't know it was officially a community center, I'd already followed my usual procedure, circling it looking for signs of pandemic life, and as usual not finding any.

After some fiddling around, I managed to escape Magnuson Park at 70th St to enter the View Ridge neighbourhood.  This turned out to be a mistake;  that ridge is all too real, and there were several scarily steep blocks.  But eventually, on the ridge's gentler western downslope, I reached

View Ridge Playfield

EXTENSIVELY EDITED; I'D FORGOTTEN THE RESTROOMS

This is one of three parks I added to this trip so as to make eventually updating the parks further north easier.  Of these three, only this one has restrooms; none have functioning water fountains.  They aren't core parks for me as the nearer ones are (and Magnuson, because it's the nearest big park to me).  But I didn't want to single them out to get no photos.  So I decided to take one photo of each, from beside its water fountain.  View Ridge Playfield suffers from this because its main water fountain has been removed "to not spread germs", according to women I asked about it, and the one that's left is behind the edge of a baseball diamond's fence:

Because I find the explanation I've heard for the water fountain's removal disturbing, I'm biased against this park.  This seems to have led me, on this trip, to forget that it has restrooms.  This is doubly embarrassing because on June 6 (the day of the edits), I was informed by a parks employee that VIEW RIDGE PLAYFIELD'S RESTROOMS ARE NOW OPEN 24 HOURS.  Given that, it seems a safe bet that they were open the day I forgot them (June 2).

From there I took 45th Ave to 65th St, then 65th to

Bryant Neighborhood Playground

A little (3 acres) and largely vertical park.  It was a little difficult to find an angle that didn't include people here:

Further along 45th, I eventually reached

Ravenna-Eckstein Park

Another 3-acre park, built around another community center.  This one's only sign of life is that it may be providing free newspapers to the neighbourhood.  The water fountain is behind the building.

I've already told the story of how finishing in one day went down in flames when Ravenna Park's restrooms proved to have closed early.  So the next day (June 3) I got up and took Sand Point Way to 

Burke-Gilman Playground Park

The third part of this park is sort of a mini-park, all grass and basketball court, that you can see from the Burke-Gilman Trail, on which are these two sculptures by Anna MacDonald:

The words on the first are "Not Yet", the second "Already".

The Burke-Gilman Trail

This time I shot from beside the fountain:

Surprise!  Yes, it is possible to get bored with green.

I take a fairly complicated route to lower

Ravenna Park

This, at fifty acres, is easily the biggest of these except for Magnuson Park.  It comes in three parts:  the lower, which features lots of complicated detail elements from which most of the "neat stuff" I've already photographed have come; the upper, which is on a rather larger scale; and the ravine, photos of which are in the last part of the page titled "Ravennawards".  Both the lower and the upper parts have restrooms that are now normally open by day, and the upper has a working water fountain, with rather hard water.  Both men's rooms have doors that latch and lock:

Also, I was mistaken when I said some time ago that the upper restrooms had no dryers.  Turns out these, which I'd thought maybe controlled since-removed showers,  are old-fashioned but working dryers:

Obviously this time I had to get "neat stuff" from the upper park, and here are two bits.  One is an actual sink in a picnic shelter.  Unfortunately it isn't on, perhaps because picnics aren't currently allowed, perhaps because it isn't sink season?

The other is a century-old bridge, for 20th Ave over Ravenna Creek, that's on the National Register of Historic Places:

Whew.  Across that bridge and on via 62nd St and 15th Ave to

Cowen Park

I've complained already about this park's gravel and stairs, and grudgingly admitted a couple of things would have been neat if they'd been in "a more reasonable park".  Here's an example far from the restrooms:

You probably can't tell, but this notice board balances better than most park notice boards the demands of the present - to the right, which I apparently failed to include (the sun's angle made this shot hard), are three 2020 notices - with the weird insistence park notice boards have on preserving past ephemera - here including at least one sign from 2012.  If it could be reached on pavement, it'd be pretty neat.

Cowen Park also has one thing I have to admit is cool enough to be neat even where it is.  This is a sort of low-risk thrill-ride version of a swing.  It doesn't photograph well, unfortunately, but I tried it today and found it scary fun.

Cowen Park's restrooms remain locked.  I don't remember their having the discernibly latchable and lockable stall doors they have now, but we've already established (at the start of "Ravennawards") that my memory for restroom doors is unreliable.

I noticed, this time, evidence of a ventilation system in the building, further mystifying me as to why Cowen Park's restrooms are seasonal.

On by a complicated route (these two parks are linked as near each other and both with closed restrooms, but they're actually pretty far apart for "near") to

University Playground

Here, again, the restrooms remain locked, not that my photo can prove that:

And the water fountain remains shut off.  As at Albert Davis Park in Lake City, the homeless people camping here have put some space between themselves.  (I haven't been ignoring encampments in the other parks in this post; I haven't noticed any.)  That said, while this park is over twice as big as Albert Davis Park, it is, at less than three acres, the smallest so far in this page, and I really don't know of any "neat stuff" I haven't already pointed out.  So let me instead correct mistakes I then made.  I should have named Richard Beyer as the sculptor of this:

and should also have noted that the artist intended it as Sasquatch, not a troll (though to my eye he actually made a troll). To my surprise, this sculpture has its own Wikipedia article.

Finally, straight down 8th Ave to 

Christie Park

This small park recently doubled in size, which prompted a complete revision.  Apparently the old park had basketball and a water fountain, or at least that's how I now interpret the parks department's web page on the park.  The new park, according to two men I found working there today, will not include a water fountain.  I'm very impressed by how much progress the work has made since my last visit, not so long ago; the park will probably open before, dear Diary, I finish writing you.