Seattle Parks Is Trying to Tell the Truth. Will I Survive the Shock?

Dear Diary,

I have a notion that being an inveterate liar is kind of like other moral failings, and so although lying has never been an important sin to me, I can figure out what it's like by analogy.  I think there are two ways to try to stop sinning in general, and so lying in particular.  One is the folk wisdom that a sinner has to "hit bottom", get to where confessing and giving up the sin is the only way forward.  But the other is to work on one's personality and one's reality until giving up the sin won't hurt so much.  In this particular case, until lying is no longer needed.  That path, which is if anything harder than hitting bottom and making other people responsible for dealing with it, is the path it seems to me the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has chosen.

I pointed out a number of ludicrous details in the department's new "dashboard" (a word I kind of wish had died of COVID-19 toward the end of the pandemic, but still, that's what it's called).  It said Cowen Park's restrooms, which had been damaged by early opening in March 2022 and hadn't re-opened since, were open.  It said Ravenna Park's lower pair of restrooms, which have been perennial targets of vandals, and where the men's room hadn't opened at all in 2022, were both open.  And to top this series of obvious whoppers off, it said University Playground's restrooms, which hadn't been opened by parks department employees at any time since before the pandemic started, were both open.

I recently learnt that I wasn't quite as poor as I thought I was, because my bank hadn't charged a fee I'd expected them to charge.  So today I splurged on a newspaper and went hiking, prepared to mock yet another parks department lying map afterward.

I found both of Cowen Park's restrooms open today.

I found all four of Ravenna Park's restrooms open today.

I didn't find either of University Playground's restrooms open today, but a small group of homeless people there told me that was because they'd been locked half an hour earlier.  Considering that it was 5:41 P.M. when I was told this, that's testimony to way too early closing, but still, sadly, believable.  Supporting this preposterous turn of events actually having happened, the restroom doors both had new handles (dear Diary, your readers can, if they wish, compare the handle shown here to those in previous photos via the tags at the bottom of the page, or directly here if reading on cell phones, which didn't offer those tags the last time I looked.)

Notice, dear Diary, that these handles are set into circular supports; the previous handles, which were blocky rather than delicate themselves, weren't set into anything like that.  I think the evidence is good that University Playground's restrooms have finally re-opened.

So the parks department has done the hard work to justify its claims regarding all the restrooms I visited today.  Including those at Burke-Gilman Playground Park.  Now, this is where Google Maps lied to me today; it claims the whole park is temporarily closed.  

 

But actually, well, let's see if I can do this:

(I was trying to just paste a print-screen from OpenStreetMap into the page.  No, I couldn't.  Darn.)  Only part of the park is closed, the northeastern part.  The parks department also tells the truth about this:

And someone carefully removed the sign adjacent to the Burke-Gilman Trail there pointing the way to the restrooms.

 

Yes, dear Diary, they're building new restrooms there.  I hope this time they're winter-proof, but I sure hope, if I become homeless again before winter and there's another pandemic, they finish quickly.

I remembered from long ago that the neatest thing I thought Burke-Gilman Playground Park had to offer was a play fortress thingy sort of at the northwestern corner of the northeastern part of the park.  So I looked in its direction from the street, but couldn't tell whether it'd been protected or not.  (I'm more pessimistic that the actually neater sundial, also mentioned in that page, could've stayed in situ and been safe, so I hope it was moved.)  The building all that landscape destruction is in aid of is still standing, but perhaps so far all they've had time to do is pull the plumbing out.  (In the photo I uploaded to Google Drive, at full size a viewer can see the holes where the water fountain was attached.)

Anyway, my point is, that this morning when I checked the dashboard again hoping they'd have stopped, as I thought, lying and I could do other stuff today, they showed a bunch of restrooms as closed due to "Capital Project"s, and this was one of them.

Their water fountain map is still way too optimistic, I suspect; it's now up to 5 off, 206 on.  I found three off today, but one isn't theirs; it's the one where University Methodist Temple used to be, the stone edifice of the water fountain (not the church) still standing, but with no plumbing left inside.  I've reported the "lower" Ravenna Park fountain using "Find It - Fix It", which is how they say they want updates to those maps.  I haven't reported yet the weird stone water fountain pretty far southwest in Laurelhurst Playfield.  I guess I'll see what happens to the water fountain map tomorrow, when I plan to hide from the rain, having already lost my umbrella this year.

The Seattle Times, whose weather forecaster likes to go to extremes, is currently predicting lows for the weekend of 33º Friday night, 32º Saturday night, and 34º Sunday night.  Usually the parks department has been able to shrug off October freezes, but if the Times's extremism comes true (as it does depressingly often), that may be a too long-lasting example for the same reaction.   No official word yet, but my point, dear Diary, is that as usual, I've left it too late to get every park visited before it all changes.  The questions is whether it matters.  Is the parks department really turning over a new leaf?  Will it, for example, admit what's happening when it closes the majority of its restrooms for the winter?  Or is this just another episode in a longer battle?

One reason I've been paying so much attention to libraries lately, dear Diary, is to have another string to your bow as well as my own.  I think the last thing I expected was to have the parks department remove your raison d'être, but if it happens, it happens.  I will admit, I found myself getting both reminiscent and bored today as I took all these photos; I really didn't want, in particular, to get the only newspaper I can probably afford soon wet by photographing water fountains.  (And Jenny Durkan is no longer in office, so need I really worry about another Durkan Drought?  Well, only if there's another pandemic...)

Anyway, photos other than the above (most of those above are actually not at these links):

Cowen Park

Ravenna Park

Burke-Gilman Trail, 30th Ave fountain

Burke-Gilman Playground Park (including none of the photos above, only the photo that sort of shows where the water fountain was)

Laurelhurst Community Center (restrooms) and Playfield (water fountains)

Burke-Gilman Trail, 47th St fountain

Former University Methodist Church, former street fountain

Christie Park

University Playground (including the photo above)

Time marches on, dear Diary; there's a reason I ditched "months" in the titles of the library pages.  I'm working on three fronts:

For part VI of public library hours, I've finished work on Wahkiakum County and started on revising the actual page and on San Juan County.  Cowlitz County, however, is nearly three times as big a job as those two put together, and Skagit County nearly four times.  So we'll see.

For part II of institutional libraries, I now have my list and just need to get through it; as I said in part I, it's a long list.

And I'm also dipping my toes into part I of academic libraries.

Whatever, though, you should hear from me again reasonably soon, dear Diary.  Happy nights and days until then.

Three Hikes in Ravenna, part I: Northwest

Dear Diary,

This page is about a bunch of places shown on this map:

I visited these places in three hikes.  The first hike was October 8, when I only visited places I knew to be owned by the City of Seattle, most listed in the 2020 real property report (27-page PDF).  I walked the whole length of Ravenna Boulevard that day, but photographed none of it, because very early on I devoted a whole page in you to it, with lots of photos, dear Diary.  The islands as shown on this map are keyed to that page's numbering of them.

Cowen Park

As already mentioned in the introduction to this set of hikes, Cowen Park's restrooms remain closed, and its water fountain continues to run.  There's still a "sanican" there.

I made a list of pages in you, dear Diary, a long time ago, and noted which ones had photos of which parks.  One of my purposes in these hikes was to take more photos, primarily landscape shots.  As of that list, I'd photographed none of Cowen Park's landscape, and although I think I've shown you one or two such photos since, considering that this was one of the parks I started with, I figured more couldn't hurt.  The first shows a view from the roof of the restroom building, aimed south of the playground; it shows the water fountain, the "sanican", and, rather blurrily under a tree, the bench at which a squirrel once attacked me and my stuff.  The second is a glance at the enormous greensward that dominates the more accessible half of this park.

Beck Place (F on map)

This is a trivial traffic triangle SDOT lists in the real property report as over 2000 square feet.  I don't know where all those square feet are hidden.

The second hike was yesterday, meaning October 14.  Its main purpose was to visit areas depicted by Open Street Map as potentially interesting.  I also went back to all the park plumbing, making sure nothing had changed in the intervening week, but nothing had.

East of I-5, area 1 (A on map)

This is a mostly grassy area, with some trees, south of the bus stop and east of the parking lot under I-5.

Ravenna Boulevard triangle 1 (D on map)

This triangle is just south of Ravenna Boulevard and west of 11th Ave NE.  It's very well kept, with a bunch of coniferous seedlings protected by flowerpots, short grass that those seedlings, when they get tall, will doom, and so on.

Ravenna Boulevard triangle 2 (E on map)

Huh.  I thought I'd complained about this one in the Ravenna Boulevard page, but evidently not.  Walking the south side of Ravenna Boulevard, as I do nowadays to get from where I live to this area, there's one place where one either has to cross a street in the middle of a block, or walk on dirt.  It's this triangle, separated by a street from the block south.

The third hike was tonight, a little too late for the photos I took; sorry, dear Diary, but I really want to get some pages out.  The hike's purpose was to walk both sides of I-5, the west just to get the map above right, the east to find these areas.

East of I-5, area 2 (B on map)

I've shown this as vast, but I really have no idea how far it goes, because it rises very steeply maybe a few dozen yards south of Ravenna Boulevard, and I have no way of guessing what it's like beyond that cliff.  For all I know the rest of it could actually be private houses.

Ravenna Boulevard triangle 3 (C on map)

This one is adjacent to a house, so I took its photo last because I wasn't sure it wasn't just their yard.  But no, it's actually public property, and dear Diary, I hope you can see something in this rather dark photo.  It isn't as neat as the 11th Ave one, but it also isn't as unkempt as the 12th Ave one.

East of I-5, area 3 (G on map)

Most of the west side of I-5 in this area is more or less accessible, with just one fenced-off section.  The east side is quite different.  People have built closer to it, and the fence is continuous from 65th to 55th at least.  But the area between I-5 (more precisely, the exit that debouches at 8th Ave NE and NE 62nd St) and the houses widens a bit south from 59th, and one can walk all the way around the Mormon church from there.  I saw reason to think the church at least did the landscaping of the part of the path adjacent to their parking lot, although I'm not sure they own it, so I coloured it in black as a private park (really, a landscaped path).  Anyway, here's the only real I-5 find between 65th and 55th in this area.

That's the northern end.  The landscaping consists mostly of the trees seen to the south.

And that's all I'm going to tell you from this map tonight, dear Diary; it's way into quiet time, but luckily I have no next-door neighbour at the moment.  Tomorrow I hope to hike some more and also tell you the rest of the Ravenna parts of the hikes.  Until then, sweet dreams, dear Diary.

Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna

Dear Diary,

Whoopee!  I'm almost ready to tell you about my hikes of one week ago.  Within a few days I hope to be completely ready; as things stand, I'm ready for the first three parts, anyway.

I liked the scale of the maps I made for downtown so much that I decided to standardise on that scale.  It's proving useful for North Seattle as well, but inconveniently, I don't yet know enough to make maps on that scale as large enough as I want them.

So these hikes are going to be narrated with more than one map per page.  Here's an overview:

"Three Hikes in Ravenna" will be illustrated by maps A, B and D.  I intend to begin writing the three parts of this page I plan tonight.

"Three Hikes in University Heights" will be illustrated by maps A and C.  I intend to begin writing the one part of this page I plan tomorrow.

"Four [or more] Hikes in Brooklyn" will be illustrated by map E.  I hope to begin writing it on Tuesday, October 18.

And whenever I can, which will probably be months from now, "Many Hikes on Campus" will be illustrated by maps E, F and G.

Spoiler:  There's very little news.  The water fountain in "lower" Ravenna Park has completely stopped working, possibly because of vandalism; however, its water is running non-stop, so it's as wasteful as it can reasonably be.  Otherwise, the park water fountains in this area - "upper" Ravenna Park, Cowen Park, University Playground and Christie Park - all work fine.  The shell of the street fountain that used to be in front of the University Temple is still behind the fence of that vacant lot.  The restrooms in "upper" Ravenna Park and the women's room in "lower" Ravenna Park are all open; the men's room in "lower" Ravenna Park and both restrooms at each of Cowen Park and University Playground are not open.  (Come winter, the only open park restroom in this area will be the women's room in "lower" Ravenna, if that.)  Oh, and most of North Passage Point is fenced off because concrete chips are falling from the bottom of the I-5 bridge.

There is, however, one very little bit of big news, which I hope to tell you about in detail before months from now, dear Diary.  The University of Washington's Seattle campus, to quote someone to whom I described you yesterday, "is becoming a locked campus".  So for the time being, while I can't photograph any of the popular parks on campus because they're thronged all day long, I'm visiting the buildings instead, and observing their hours.  Just in the few days I've been doing this, I've seen several hours changes, but in broad outline, the quote is true.  Concretely, I spent my days at the UW mostly in five buildings, at least fourteen hours inside per day.  If I become homeless again in the near future, one of those buildings will be closed to me, and the other four's hours have been cut very much.  I've already found a few examples of other buildings becoming more accessible, but none in ways that would actually make a difference.  So I'd certainly have to spend holidays outside, and weekends during breaks outside, and probably could spend no more than twelve hours per day inside during regular quarters, and no more than eight in summer quarter and breaks.

Between this, the park restrooms' closures, and the closure of the Urban Rest Stop's U-District branch, it's become immensely harder to be homeless in the U-District lately.  No doubt if I were to ask anyone who made the relevant decisions about this, they'd say it was all a coincidence.  They'd mention COVID-19, the difficulty of hiring anyone (people are so hard to find right now that I've managed to stay unemployed for seven months!), and budget tightness.  But, well, to whatever extent I'm a journalist at all, I'm not the kind of journalist who asks people like that questions like that.  I'm just going to document what I can of the facts I observe, and leave your readers to decide what they mean.

This problem is much bigger than the libraries, but I hope anyway to tell you, dear Diary, about the public university libraries - meaning the major state schools, mainly UW but also Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington State University in Vancouver, Evergreen State College (which now offers some masters' degrees, so I'm counting it as a university), and also the campuses without libraries of Central Washington University and Western Washington University in Everett and Eastern Washington University in Sammamish.  Tuesday, October 18.

As a reminder, here's the key I'm using:

To unpack:

Open land (without concern for how easy it is to walk through) is green if it's represented by the City of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  It's blue if it's owned by any other governmental unit.  And it's black if it's privately owned.

Open land is also olive green if it's owned by the Seattle parks department, if it's closed to the public in some way (usually a fence, for open land).  Similarly, it's whatever that different bluish colour is called if it's owned by some other governmental unit, and dark gray if it's privately owned.

Buildings are the same colours but only in outline.  (Usually, closed buildings are just locked.)

Restrooms are shown as small rectangular outlines.  There are four cases:  Are they on open land, or somewhere else?  And are they open to the public (at least some of the time) or are they closed?  In practise, I needn't have worried quite so much.  Essentially all buildings open to the public have working restrooms, though not all such buildings have public working restrooms.  A restroom that isn't working or isn't public is red.  (The careful reader will notice that this is a change from the key.  Sorry, but I'd rather spend time writing up the results of the hikes than updating that key.)  A public restroom that is working is the colour of the owner, or if it's on open or closed land (which is usually the case), it's white.

Water fountains are shown as small round outlines.  They have the same colour pattern as restrooms.

All for now, dear Diary.  Let me try to get at least part of "Three Hikes in Ravenna" written up tonight.  But if not, have a good night, and I should manage to write the first part by tomorrow morning.

Cowen Park and University Playground Today

Dear Diary,

As I continue preparing for the pages actually about throwing away amenities, it is, of course, important for me to visit the relevant parks.  And anyone who's read many of your pages could expect that these two parks would be relevant.

At Cowen Park, the water fountain is running fine, but I found the restrooms closed at 4 P.M. on a Saturday.  I had trouble finding a Saturday newspaper, so it doesn't appear in the photos in this page, but the four door shots are at the relevant Google Drive folders (Cowen, University), which means all the other tools I use to preserve date information for photos are still there.

This means, essentially, that probably because of the men's room's untimely re-opening in March, Cowen Park's restrooms haven't opened (otherwise) all year.  This is less of an issue for knowledgeable homeless people in the U-District than it could be now, because this autumn Savery Hall at the UW re-opened to the public, as, with more limited hours, did some University libraries, and perhaps, other buildings.  But it must have made for a hard summer and spring there, especially now that Safeway, whose restrooms were very limitedly open to customers, is closed, as, of course, is the Urban Rest Stop's U-District location.

[Correction 11/18:  Savery isn't open its full hours.  So basically, homeless people around there who, like me, abhor "sanican"s still have to fast on weekends, or hike a long way.

In case that card's too dark for you, dear Diary, what it says is that Savery is only open 7:30 A.M. to 6 P.M., and only Mondays through Fridays, not including holidays.  Significantly shorter hours than park restroom hours, if any park restrooms in the U-District had opened this year at all.  Sorry for the mistake, dear Diary, and sorry to the homeless of the U-District for claiming that their troubles are even partly over.]

Meanwhile at University Playground?  I immediately noticed an absence.  The tent to the right of the main park entrance, which had been there for years, was gone.  Someone had taken the trouble to write about that:

The park maintenance man whom I first met at Laurelhurst Playfield, and again at Ravenna and Cowen Parks, had spoken well of her to me.  He said she had taught at the UW.  He said that it was an ongoing headache for the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation to make sure that, whenever University Playground was swept (in those years not by parks staff), her increasingly baroque setup was left alone.  So I never expected to find this.  I never spoke with her - she took pains to present a prickly exterior by leaving notes outside her place, and I rarely try to break through such - but I'd seen her sweeping the tennis courts.  She is an old, petite, black woman, and if anyone reads this who knows what's become of her, please comment.

Anyway, as a result, I can now photograph the important piece of park property her tent obstructed, thus ruining the enjoyment of millions:

Yep, a piece of pavement, which was undoubtedly severely damaged in ways invisible in this photo by the presence for so long of a homeless woman.  We're catching that way, aren't we?

Anyway, perhaps thanks to the removal of her restraining influence, the park is now the scene of a sort of arms race.  Someone seems to have drilled out the locks that have kept the restrooms there closed for at least two years, and probably longer.  So the parks department has installed temporary padlocks.  The women's room door:

Someone has burned down the latest "sanican":

And, um, the men's room door:

A close-up showing how that came to pass:

I did walk in, wanting to see again the one park men's room in North Seattle I'd been in before the pandemic, but not since.  It didn't occur to me to check whether the water was running - stupid of me, dear Diary, and I'm sorry.

I've been affected enough by the Korean TV shows I've watched for so many years that one reaction I have to this whole thing is that Jenny Durkan should be ashamed of herself for picking on a woman so much older than she is.  I'd very much like to hear that the person who wrote the comment on that sign was ill-informed, and this woman I never spoke with got a happy ending at least as genuine as my own, but partly because of the subject I've been researching, I find that difficult to believe.

The two parks maintenance men I've talked with at length have two different theories as to why University Playground's restrooms have been closed for so long.  The vandalism-hater thinks it's because of a pretty specific, hard to fix, example of vandalism.  The homeless-woman-respecter thinks it's because if the restrooms were open, she would camp in the women's room.  This horrifies me, because I remember University Playground's men's room as nasty even as park restrooms go.  During their 24-hour-open weeks at the beginnings of school years (which I first learnt of well after I became homeless), I've found men sleeping in the men's room, and that always gave me a similar feeling to, say, cockroaches - extreme disgust.  Maybe the women's room normally used to stay a whole lot nicer, but in any event, his theory seems to be exploded, because even after her departure, the parks department is at pains to keep these restrooms closed.

The parks department has, in fact, been at pains since the pandemic began to deny that these restrooms exist.  The whole series of hikes I took for you, dear Diary, this past winter, to check this map offered by the city's Department of Human Services, began because I was offended by what I took as an error - the map represented closed park restrooms as open as long as there were "sanican"s nearby.  With the exception of University Playground.  So I started with the expectation that University Playground was the norm, and didn't really understand that the city's homelessness agency was really deliberately lying to homeless people about access to hygiene services - specifically, sinks and soap - until the disastrous stay in a motel halfway through the hikes.  I still don't know why that map omitted University Playground, and only that park, last winter, and am waiting to see what it does this winter.  Also, the list I received, of seasonal restrooms that are seasonally closed because they really can't take cold weather, omits University Playground, even though it's obviously an example.

The parks department's page for University Playground does still recognise that this park has restrooms, both in its coded list of amenities and in its text.  So there's room to hope that demolition is not the next step in the arms race, but not much more than hope.  Which is about the same feeling I have for the future of the old woman who lived so long in that park, but no longer does.  After several weeks of work, I could even contribute some money myself, if that were necessary, if I knew how.  Please, if anyone knows, tell.

Today's Hike: Many water fountains turned on in areas around the University

Dear Diary,

I have very little time left to tell you much about today's hike, so will summarise.

I went to Christie Park, University Playground, Cowen Park, Ravenna Park, the Burke-Gilman Trail (specifically, its eastern water fountain), Burke-Gilman Playground Park, and Laurelhurst Playfield and Community Center.  Also University Heights Plaza, which still has "sanican"s and an SPU sink, and Ravenna Boulevard, which still has no plumbing.

Restrooms - All open except, still, Cowen Park and University Playground.

Water fountains - All running except, still, Christie Park.  The double water fountain in the northeast of Laurelhurst Playfield is probably un-useable, however:  the lower bowl gives so little water I doubt it can be drunk, let alone fill a bottle, while the upper one overshoots its bowl so spectacularly, the same doubts hold.  The single water fountain in the same playfield's southwest was much cooler than the last time I tried it, last year, so evidently is just affected by the temperature in general, rather than specifically heated.

I found that I do still, after months of filtered tap water, like the water from Burke-Gilman Playground Park's water fountain.

I then went to another suburban library for another Korean drama (which I'd actually hoped to get from the first one last week), and found the water fountains still shut off, but the men's room was fine.

On returning downtown I looked for three of the street fountains listed on the pseudo-map that I hadn't known about.

The one at 298 James St, actually a little north of James on the west side of 3rd Ave, is running despite both kinds of damage I'd found in other running fountains:  its control-and-spout mechanism is wobbly, as at 5th & Olive Way, and its push button is uncapped, as at 1st & Pike.

I couldn't find one within a block of 200 Columbia St.

I did find one at 898 3rd Ave, that is, on the east side of 3rd Ave just south of Marion, but from the ingrained dirt in the bowl, I doubt it's run any time this past year, and it certainly wasn't running tonight.

The fountains at 2nd & Madison and at 3rd & Union were running, but I found I liked the taste of neither.

So things are looking up in North Seattle, but Seattle Public Utilities lied at least a little.  I'll take what I can get.  Good night, dear Diary.

Another running street fountain

Dear Diary,

Today I went to Cowen Park (whose restrooms are still closed, and whose water fountains, last to be turned on last year, I didn't bother to check today) and to Cal Anderson Park (whose restrooms, such as they are, are still open, and whose main water fountain I drank from at length twice).

I actually e-mailed Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, about Cowen Park.  I remembered that although they had no shame about telling people there were restrooms where there were only "sanican"s, when I was checking this map last winter they did care when the map's fine print was wrong about restrooms being open, which is the case for Cowen Park.  So I e-mailed her, for the first time since I told you, dear Diary, "How to Lie to the Homeless", but she was out of the office today.

Anyway, after bringing some boxes to my storage and filling several, I walked away with almost the last of my pans (the saucepans, so now I can cook!  After only three months here!  Yay!).  Cal Anderson Park was after that; I took a brief look at the former site of Everyday Music between the two drinks.

And then I walked north on Broadway and found this:

That's the street water fountain on Broadway E just north of E Olive Way.

The one that was turned off last summer at about the same time as the fancy new water fountain was installed at Cal Anderson Park, as if Capitol Hill didn't deserve additional water, just relocated water.  The one some nameless person begged:  "Make it work".  Well, that person finally got their wish.

When will it be North Seattle's turn?  This year, or next?

I promised to do a bunch of stuff in the Google Drive folders today, and am running out of time to do it, so good night, dear Diary.

The Biblically Heroic Sweep of Cowen Park

Dear Diary,

Today I went to Ravenna Boulevard, Cowen Park, Ravenna Park and 17th Ave NE, whose boulevard is considered a park by the Seattle Department of Transportation, but not by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.

Important news:  Both the "upper" restrooms in Ravenna Park were open.  I didn't have my newspaper with me, so didn't take pictures.  But there are now open park restrooms sort of near the U-District.  I found no other changes in the parks' plumbing - neither Cowen nor Ravenna has a running water fountain, Cowen's restrooms are still closed (and in a recent page I boneheadedly forgot that they do have explanatory signs on their doors), and Ravenna's lower men's room too.

The block of Ravenna Boulevard between 15th Ave and University Way NE, also known as Olga Park, was swept this morning.  A camper there was murdered by a visitor earlier this week, and so the entire camp was punished.  This is, of course, biblically correct, dear Diary, for as Numbers 14:18 says:  "and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation."  Imagine how much better a place Seattle would be if every neighbourhood where anyone was murdered were evacuated and levelled.  We might still have five buildings standing in town, who knows?

At any rate, this meant that, given my policy against showing you photos of tents, that today was my first chance to take landscape photos of Olga Park.

I found a notice proper in form, though it didn't meet the 72-hour standard that was once legally required:

There was also this confusing declaration:

Given that the parks department is now allotting itself two weeks to do nothing, presumably because the one week in which they did nothing at Albert Davis Park hadn't been enough, they did a really thorough job of putting up closure signage:

However, what I witnessed, and in fact participated in, wasn't the sweep of Olga Park, but of Cowen Park.

I found a couple of young women with stacks of pizzas and other stuff set up across 15th Ave NE from where I took the picture just above.  They told me Cowen Park was being swept as we spoke.  Since I'd never actually seen a sweep done, I figured I owed it to you, dear Diary, to find out what they're like.

What I found was a rather odd confrontation.  A single tent stood in one of the awkward corners Cowen Park has many of.  A man stood in front of it.  Surrounding him on three sides were many employees of the parks department.  And on what passes for a sidewalk at the edge of Cowen Park - that is, a dirt path with some edgy gravel here and there - stood a bunch of people yelling at the parks department employees.

The man who was in front of that tent is black, as are quite a few of the parks department employees, including both of those I'll quote to you, dear Diary, from memory.  There may have been a white parks department employee or two there, but I didn't notice them; there were people of various other races.  Essentially all the protestors were white; mostly young women, and a few who might have been men, plus one man at least my age.  He and one less young woman, who turned out herself to be homeless (she claimed to have seen tents slashed at Albert Davis Park, where she was living May 6), were by far the loudest.  There was a guy on a bicycle who struck me as not really belonging to any of these groups, but who seemed to have some sort of rapport with the man in front of the tent; he's also black, and for all I know he could be anything from a relative to a fellow homeless man (though if so, he was travelling awfully light) to a dealer to a social worker.

For a while everyone focused on each other, and a weird sort of argument.  Some of the protestors yelled, others, including me, made caustic but quieter remarks.  The parks department employees said what they could, quoting law, saying they were just doing their jobs (and that bit of World War II folklore has certainly not died out from among the youth of today, unfortunately for people just doing their jobs everywhere...).  Since the louder people were the angriest, and had trouble restraining their movements, things escalated, giving the parks employees all the excuse they needed to call the police, and when those arrived, the whole confrontation collapsed.

Two episodes in the confrontation are worth quoting.  At one point a parks department employee apologised to the homeless man.  Apparently this employee had advised him, while sweeping Olga Park, that Cowen Park might be a safe place to go, and now regretted giving this advice.

At another point, when one of the protestors asked where the man should go next, a parks department employe mentioned that there are mountains all around Seattle with plenty of places to camp.  I reiterate that the person who said this boneheaded thing is just as black as the foolishly compassionate colleague, and as the homeless man himself.

Anyway, on the police's arrival, several of the quieter young women started giving orders which various people obeyed, and next thing I knew I was one of about half a dozen people lifting the tent before it'd been emptied.  Basically, the protestors and their hangers-on (including me) did the sweep for the parks department.  They certainly did check our work, but we left the spot as clean as they would have.

Ironically, the next stop was ... Ravenna Boulevard, halfway across the street.  One block from Olga Park.  The protestors had hired a rental van, which arrived reasonably soon, but the homeless man had trouble deciding what to do.  By the time I left he'd pretty much decided to spend the night there on Ravenna Boulevard, and maybe the next day move to the doorway of a vacant building across the street.  Last time I saw him, a few hours later, he was still there.

I followed my usual rules, dear Diary:  I tried not to photograph any tents or people, and will not show you my failures.  Here's what I did photograph:

First, the vast threat this one man's tent posed to the public's enjoyment of Cowen Park:

Notice also in that photo the vehicles.  There were well over five parks department employees there, and if I wasn't willing to photograph them, I was certainly willing to photograph their trucks.  Here's another:

Really, I think there were more like ten of them.  The group I spoke with later was four men, and was definitely not even close to all.

So yes, obviously one tent would've made it impossible for anyone else to use Cowen Park.  And of course someone just swept has no right to pitch a tent where the sweepers can see.  After all, sweeps are like bills of attainder, which everyone knows are constitutional somewhere:  they attach to this man, and to his descendants unto the third generation.  Little details like notice or legal authority don't matter compared to that.

Anyway, that's the threat from which these valiant parks department employees spared the neighbours of Cowen Park.  I put off writing this page, dear Diary, long enough to skim the books of Numbers and of Joshua, looking for something explicitly saying that evildoers should be hounded from door to door until slain, or some such, an explicit declaration that those not of the tribe must all die.  I didn't find one; I'm just not as biblically literate as I thought I was.  Oddly, however, in other books which some people consider biblical, one finds other things, for example this, from Matthew 25: 31-40:

³¹ When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

³² And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

³³ And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

³⁴ Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

³⁵ For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

³⁶ Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

³⁷ Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

³⁸ When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

³⁹ Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

⁴⁰ And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Good night, dear Diary.

Details of southern NE Seattle, part I

Dear Diary,

Yesterday I really didn't want to go hiking, so I decided to start with the toughest job left:

Magnuson Community Center and Park

As you already know, I found two restroom pairs open, the usual two closed, and, also as usual, no water fountains running.  The central men's room has two toilets without stall doors, two urinals, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.  The beach men's room has two toilets without stall doors, two urinals, one sink, one dryer that I haven't found working since last May, and one soap dispenser.  Anyway, there were also other things worth telling you about.

Near the entrance this sign currently stands:

Now, way back in October, in "Water Fountains - An Interim Report", part II, I wrote as follows about the joys of approaching Magnuson Park:

| 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.

So never let it be said that the current city administration has done nothing for me.

The Cross Park Trail (officially the South Cross Park Trail, but since the North one doesn't cross nearly as much of the park, I don't care) reaches the lakefront path halfway between the beach restrooms and the "tower" ones.  I turned south towards the "tower" first.  Along the way I spotted a sign on a tree.  I like it when parks make it possible to identify plants - we'll see an example on a much bigger scale later - so I stopped to look at the sign:

What Green Seattle Partnership aren't telling you in this sign is that because this tree isn't native to Washington, they'd just love to have the chance to uproot it.  That's why they make an issue about its being native here at all; they just can't help themselves, even when they're trying to be politic and not tell people that the tree providing those people with shade ought not to be there.

Anyway, speaking of uprooting, I think something's changed at the "tower" since I first visited it, although I'm not sure just when.  The change is that the water fountain there is now considered a risky thing to approach:

I was going to say that it had never hurt me, but actually, when I first visited this fountain last May, I vaguely remember that the controls then existing, as opposed to now, actually sort of bit my thumb.  So I suppose this caution is warranted.

I put an extra photo into the Google Drive folder where I keep all the boring shots showing me trying to get water from water fountains and observing open (or, on this trip, closed) restroom doors.  Let me repeat it here:

That's one of the two shower controls for Magnuson Park's beach showers.  Notice that it can't be turned.  Neither can.  Now, this could be vandalism, even metal thievery, but I've been coming to believe that this kind of controls-disabling is actually done by employees of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, and this is a case in point.  Why would metal thieves have stopped where they did?

The Magnuson Community Center is under construction:

and could thus be excused if it were ignoring the idea of "re-opening" as much as other Community Centers are.  But actually, when I went to its temporary home at the Brig (west entrance), this is what I found:

Much better than when I looked for it in January and couldn't find it.

Burke-Gilman Playground Park

Its water fountain, whose water I really like, is off.  Its restrooms are open.  The men's room has one toilet with a door that doesn't latch or lock, one urinal, two sinks, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.  The bench I liked still has not been repaired.

The Burke-Gilman Trail

It's been a long time since I showed you a video, dear Diary, so I thought I'd show you this one, although it's very short.  Its point is that the Burke-Gilman Trail's eastern water fountain, one of only two park water fountains running in southern "NE", is not in ideal shape.

It's dripping both at the control and from the opposite side of the fountain.

In order to make sure I actually got going, I left the house without taking time to pack food or water (though I did drink some before leaving).  To make matters worse, I got a bag of tortilla chips for breakfast, where I got the newspaper.  So I was pretty thirsty by this point, and, ignoring the damage, washed and filled both the empty bottles I was carrying there.  The water proved good, as it has been in the past.

Speaking of the past, this fountain is part of why I'm suspicious of controls vandalism.  Last winter the controls were visibly damaged, but when the fountains came back on the controls of this one were magically healed.

Since I had water, I didn't need to get it from University Village, and so was free to get my day's healthy food at Safeway.  But I didn't like what they had available, so went to Chipotle in U-Village anyway.

Ravenna Park

Neither men's room is open, only the lower women's room is open, and neither water fountain is running.

I took, and uploaded to Google Drive, two photos of the upper women's room door, one a close-up trying to show the latch that locks it.  I remember doing the same with the men's room but the photo doesn't seem to have taken.

The lower men's room door bears a sign blaming the closure on vandalism.  Both upper rooms' doors bear signs blaming the closure on all four choices:  seasonal closure, vandalism, malfunction or freeze, and maintenance needed.

Near the lower restrooms is a sandbox that constantly spills sand onto the pavement nearby.  A man was sweeping the sand away, blessed be he, and when he saw me taking pictures he introduced himself and explained, with rather slow speech, his job, involving programs at this park.  Someone better equipped than I should try to get this guy the fifteen minutes of fame he seems to want.

On my way between the lower and upper restrooms and water fountains, I stopped at a Little Free Library.  While I looked, a parks employee drove up and hailed me; it was the man I'd met at Northacres Park.  He'd regaled me with tales of closed restrooms then (one involved an unhappy rabbit in the women's beach restroom at Magnuson); this time, he just listed them to me.

Nevertheless, I took a big risk and ate my burrito and drank a bottle of water near the picnic shelter near the upper restrooms, not knowing where I could take care of the probable results.

Cowen Park

Neither restroom was open.  This time only the "malfunction or freeze" box was checked.  You may remember, dear Diary, that in "Some Odds and Ends" I mentioned having seen the men's room here open on March 23, with the water running.  Since UW, nearby, recorded 36° F on the Atmospheric Sciences Building rooftop as recently as April 11, a freeze wouldn't be much of a wonder.

The water fountain also isn't running.

University Heights Plaza

As I told you, dear Diary, I'd worried about the SPU sinks.  Well, in the U-District, they're still there:

Here's a close-up of their new decoration:

On my way to the next park, I stopped by the University branch of the Seattle Public Library.  It thinks there's plenty of time left before it has to worry about anything like "re-opening":

University Playground

This park was recently swept.  So, as at Albert Davis Park, this was the first time I could shoot a landscape at this park without catching a tent, so I did that, even though the landscape of this park is singularly uninteresting:

The restrooms remain closed without explanation.  I've heard two explanations of very different kinds from the two parks employees with whom I've talked the most (one, the guy mentioned above), so I don't know what to think.

On the way to the next park, I verified that the SPU sink is still at the encampment at I-5 and NE 45th St.  Remembering that I hadn't actually tried the one at U-Heights, I decided to photograph this one running:

And there I'd better stop, because I have more photos to show you, dear Diary, and this is sort of a natural stopping point.  Until later today, then.