On the Last Day of Summer

Dear Diary,

I didn't fulfill my goal of hiking this summer, as I'd hoped.  I'm just too lazy in hot weather to get it done.  But it wasn't hot today, and I thought I could at least visit four places that have things I understood as summer-specific, things that would be gone tomorrow.  Two of those places have restrooms I've never even seen.  So I went out, though mostly by bus rather than on foot, to:

• Magnuson Park's Armory, the east side, where there are restroom doors I'd never found open, but which supposedly open in summer;
• Matthews Beach's restroom building, the east side, where there are doors to restrooms, supposedly equipped with showers, which I'd never found open because they're supposedly opened only in summer for beachgoers;
• Soundview Playfield's water fountain, which is adjacent to a water play area, so I'd always assumed it didn't work because it was on the same pipes as that area; 
• and Green Lake Park's Bathhouse Theatre building, whose restrooms' doors to the outside open summer and winter, but not spring and fall.  Even before I lived near it, though, I was familiar with this one.

(The links are to folders at my Google Drive account where photos, including ones not shown below, can be found.)

Now, my premise could be faulted.  The last day of summer by astronomical standards is the day before the equinox, September 21st this year.  It's right on the front page of the Seattle Public Schools' website that classes don't start until September 6th for most students, which means tomorrow is the last day of summer for them.  Cliff Mass told us a week ago that meteorological autumn was kicking in early this year.  My personal definition of summer for Seattle (as opposed to other, Midwestern, places I've lived) is that it ends at the end of September.  (See, I don't think Seattle has a winter unless it snows.  So I figure four months for each of the other seasons.)

But Labor Day is still a traditional meaning in the US for "last day of summer", and that meant for me that it was a reasonable guess as to what the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation would use as a cutoff.  Hence my trip today.

So what happened?

Magnuson Park

Nothing new here.

Maybe nobody remembered to open them on Labor Day because the parks department was short-staffed.  Maybe someone at the parks department was watching the weather and said "No point in opening these, the temperature won't exceed 70."  (And how does that affect the crying need for restrooms in that part of Magnuson Park?)  But maybe the parks department has simply forgotten that once upon a time, these doors actually opened once in a while, and were advertised as being open in summer.  All I know is that they were closed, and since they don't have handles, that means they were locked.

Matthews Beach

Matthews Beach has two sets of restrooms.  One set is a pair of ungendered single-user stalls.  The other is a pair of gendered rooms that include not just toilets and sinks, but also, so I'm told, showers.  (As opposed to the outdoor showers offered at Magnuson and Golden Gardens Parks.  I don't remember any at Carkeek Park, but that doesn't prove they aren't there too.)

Because I don't hike in summer, I've never found those rooms open.  Well, not today either.  I took four photos, dear Diary, and will show you just one, saving the rest for the Google Drive folders.

 

See, these doors do have handles.  So how could I prove that the doors were locked without taking an action photo and risking my new phone?  Well, notice not far to the right of the handle in that photo - yes, there's a lock on the door.  That's how.

So.  Matthews Beach was closed to swimming for the rest of the summer in mid-July, because the parks department no longer has the staffing flexibility to keep trying to re-open it.  I suppose it makes sense therefore to close the shower restrooms.  After all, despite the park's distance from places where homeless people hang out, there's always the risk that some homeless person could use the showers to get clean, and we all know that it's evil to let homeless people become more like other people.  More realistically, there's the risk of vandalism, especially without a staffer (lifeguard) on site.

But at this rate, am I ever going to see these restrooms?  Am I ever going to catch just the right eyeblink of summer to go looking?

So I was worried that Soundview Playfield's kind of boxlike restrooms might be hard to reach because of construction (I thought I'd heard something about the play field itself, adjacent, getting a makeover; maybe I had, but there was no construction and no signage when I got there), and I was worried that the buses would take too long (but actually I had excellent luck with buses today)...  So I used one of the single-user stalls at Matthews Beach.  Most of what I used worked just fine.  However, the sink seemed to reach equilibrium with water still at its bottom, and the photo of that I tried to take will illustrate the other problem with that stall:

(Yes, dear Diary, the light didn't come on.)

Things improved from here, however.

Soundview Playfield

For three years now, I've assumed Soundview Playfield's water fountain didn't work because it was on the same plumbing as the adjacent water feature, so when the latter was turned off (most of the time), so was the water fountain.

To prepare for today's trip, I even checked this helpful schedule, but in an epically stupid move, convinced myself to ignore what the page said in black and while about how Soundview's wading pool 

would close on August 20th, I just knew it really had a spray park, and those didn't close until today.  Honestly, after my complaints about tech malfunctions earlier this evening - well, I should be grateful that tech doesn't malfunction as consistently as my brain does.  But anyway, I found out before leaving that I'd misunderstood, but still determined to go.

And I'm glad I did, because it turns out Soundview Playfield's water fountain can actually run while the pool isn't in operation; I'd been wrong about that all along.

Green Lake Park

Nothing new here, either.  The Bathhouse Theatre building restrooms were open, as they should have been (unlike the two sets above).

So that was my summer adventure.  I'll try to take it earlier next summer, or maybe only when there are no algae to worry about, or something.

I hope to check the rest of the park restrooms before winter, but I'm not making any promises.  That said, October isn't far away, and my public libraries spreadsheet did survive the crash, so it'll soon be time for, and I can deliver, another round of library hours pages.  One way or another, anyway, happy days and nights, dear Diary, until we meet again.

Truth and fantasy about park restrooms in winter

Dear Diary,

I've now mapped the park restrooms that were promised to be open in North Seattle last winter:

and then modified that map by what I found in February and in March:

The big circles that are obvious on the map represent differences between what I found and what we were all told last November.  Eight of those differences are restrooms closed that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's spokes-person claimed would be open; and two are restrooms open that she did not claim would be.

1. Little Brook Park.  We were told the unheated wooden box of a restroom this park has would be open this past winter, and to emphasise the point, responsibility for keeping it open was given to both the Northwest and the Northeast parks maintenance crews.  However, someone on one of those crews sensibly enough put a closure sign up instead.  Lake City still needs real park restrooms, which should be in Virgil Flaim Park; it doesn't need jokes about the inadequate room it has instead.
   
2. Jackson Park.  The parks department tends to ignore this park in many ways, including lists of restrooms; in particular, the restrooms there are maintained, opened and closed by employees of a private lessee, not by the parks department.  So this is more an apparent difference than a real one, but still, there's restrooms in a city-owned park that were open this past winter but not in the posted list, so it's still a difference.
3. Sandel Playground.  Both in 2020-2021 and in 2022-2023 I found the restrooms there locked; in both years they were supposed to open.  I think this is a disagreement between the parks department's PR people and the northwest maintenance crew.  I hope they settle it before next winter.
4. Green Lake Park, Bathhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open in winter and summer, but not in spring and fall, so again, I wasn't surprised to find them open despite their omission from the posted list, but it's still a difference.
   
5. Salmon Bay Park.  I'm not sure whether this building has heat, but it doesn't have much room for it, and these restrooms haven't customarily been open in winter.  I'm guessing this lie was meant to appease people in Ballard who want the homeless to have somewhere to go besides the library and the bushes.  Maybe including Ballard's city council member?  Or maybe it was much less than that, just a joke on me, as previously suggested.  Mind, dear Diary, I still don't have a clue why the indoor restrooms with doors that open to the outdoors, in the Ballard Community Center, close each winter, unless it's out of hatred towards homeless people.  But we weren't promised Ballard Community Center last winter, and we were promised Salmon Bay Park.
   
6. Green Lake Park, Shellhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the building they're in is currently behind a construction fence.
7. Ravenna Park, lower restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the men's room has been locked for years, and the women's room was locked too when I went there this past winter.
8. Woodland Park, Citywide Athletics Building ("Rio") restrooms.  These have also been locked for years, and have acquired an impressive amount of graffiti on this subject.  Now, closing restrooms in winter that could be kept open is supposed to enable the parks maintenance crews to clean graffiti up, so I'm not sure why they're neglecting these examples.  Nor am I clear on why the athletes were left without restrooms this past winter, considering that a perfectly reasonable alternative (Woodland Park Cloverleaf) is available a few blocks north, and was opened winter 2020-2021.
9. University Playground.  The restrooms have been closed for years, since the pandemic began and probably since before then.  They've been fenced in, in the recent past; they're now welded shut.  A blatant lie.
10. Gas Works Park.  A little further along than the Green Lake Small Crafts Center (whose restrooms are referred to by the name of the nearby Shellhouse); here it's the place where the building was that's now surrounded by a construction fence.

In the past, I've suggested that the parks department's pathological inability to tell the truth about its winter restrooms resulted from a sorcerer's spell.  This year, there's perhaps a more prosaic explanation.  This past winter, visitors to parks all over southern North Seattle, south of 65th, say, got to experience what park visitors in Lake City experience all the time:  no restrooms.  As many were closed despite claims they'd be open, as were open:  Green Lake Shellhouse, Woodland "Rio", Gas Works, lower Ravenna, and University were all promised but closed; Woodland Pink Palace and 50th, Green Lake 64th, Wallingford and - I presume, not having gotten there myself - Laurelhurst were all promised and open.  Now, something similar happens in West Seattle on a regular basis, and West Seattle typically has more political power in Seattle than southern North Seattle does.  But maybe the parks department didn't like the optics of admitting how far someone needing a restroom would have to walk, in southern North Seattle, so it decorated truth with fantasy.

Or maybe it didn't like admitting how few open restroom locations in North Seattle it was using our tax dollars to support this winter, so it added a few it knew wouldn't be open.  We were promised 25.  We got 18.  (Jackson Park's restrooms aren't supported by tax dollars.)  In 2019-2020, we got 23.  We got 72% of what was promised, and 78% of three years ago.  In my experience, in school, these would usually be passing grades, but they aren't in my current job.  Are they passing grades in parks department jobs?

At least this year, there isn't an agency serving the homeless that relies on the parks department to tell the truth about its own property.  So with any luck, my former peers weren't misled by those lies.  I wonder who else was.

Good night, dear Diary.  I don't know when I'll be back, so have a happy spring, by day and night both.

My March Hikes

Dear Diary,

This page concerns four hikes I made in March.  The first two started pretty late, so didn't cover many parks.  The fourth was too late to observe the parks in winter, and anyway had to be cut short because I had to make it to an appointment for work.  (Three of my four Wednesdays "off" in the last month of tax season ended up with appointments anyway.)  So only the third was a really useful hike, but I have things to tell you from the others as well.

March 5th

On this day, having started late, I only made it to Jackson Park, Northacres Park and Playfield, Bitter Lake Playfield, and Sandel Playground; the links are to the folders at Google Drive with most of the photos.  I already talked about Sandel.  All the others deserve attention here.

Jackson Park

As usual, this park's water fountains were on:

Northacres Park and Playfield

As usual, this park's specially winter-adapted water fountains:

had been shut down for the winter:

My best guess is that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation didn't deliberately set out to waste this special quality of these fountains.  Rather, I'm thinking they attached them to a restroom building that at that time was heated, but whose heating since broke down and wasn't fixed.  On the other hand, the recently installed set of similar fountains (without explicit labels) at Cal Anderson Park have been shut down every winter since they appeared, so maybe the parks department actually does buy winter-proof fountains without any intention of using their winter-proof qualities.  I don't know.

Bitter Lake Playfield

There's nothing unusual about Bitter Lake's restrooms as well as water fountains being shut down in winter.

Except that that building wasn't supposed to look like that any more:

Maybe there wasn't a plan to heat the building, but at least the restrooms were going to be de-gendered.  (And presumably lose their urinals.)  What happened?

Several projects have been rescheduled, of course, not just this one.  What confuses me is the question whether there are limits to this rescheduling.  Later in this page I'm showing you some torn-down restroom buildings, dear Diary.  Will those projects be rescheduled before the replacements are put up?

March 12th

That day I had a lot to do other than hike, so the only park I made it to was Salmon Bay Park, for the second time, an hour earlier than the first, as discussed in the first page about this set of hikes.

March 19th

I only reached five parks on my last Sunday off during tax season, but two are kind of large:  Gas Works Park, Wallingford Playfield, Meridian Playground, Woodland Park and Green Lake Park.  Also the street fountain on 45th, which wasn't running.

Gas Works Park

The main decorative motif in the core area of Gas Works Park where the actual gas works are, as well as the restrooms, water fountains, playground and so forth, is currently fences.  The parks department claims that this is because construction on the long-planned renovations in that area has begun:

But it seems to me all that's happened so far is, um, destruction:

So this is one of the projects I'm worried about.

To be fair, the parks department has deployed lots of "sanican"s to the parking lot, as well as at least one hand-washing station.

Woodland Park

The list of restrooms to be open this winter posted by Christina Hirsch in November includes three entries in this park:  "Woodland Park 50th", which is near some of the picnic shelters; "Woodland Park Pink Palace", which is near the rest of the picnic shelters - both in the western part of the non-zoo part of the park (and both of which I did indeed find open).  And "Woodland Park Rio".  That refers to the restrooms whose doors open to the outside in the Citywide Athletics Building, toward the southern end of the park's easternmost part, the athletic fields.  These restrooms:

I'm not clear on why, this past winter, there were restrooms for the people hiking on the west side of the block, but none for the much greater number doing athletic stuff on the east side.  Last time I went these rounds, the restrooms at the centre of the baseball cloverleaf were opened, daylight hours more or less, to substitute for "Rio"'s closure.  This time, I found the building's attached water fountain running, which certainly suggests it has some kind of heat.  But on March 19th, 2023, I didn't find the cloverleaf restrooms open, in full daylight at 3:18 P.M.

As with the restrooms in lower Ravenna Park, these "Rio" rooms have been closed for well over a year now.  The list I'm checking was actively revised; why did the reviser not know about these two closures?

Green Lake Park

Another revision in that list concerned Green Lake Park.  Customarily, the "Bathhouse" restrooms, that is, those with doors opening to the outside at the Bathhouse Theatre building where the Public Theatre presents shows, have been open in winter.  This winter's list omitted them, but in fact they were, as usual, open, at least on March 19th:

Flipside, the list of open restrooms for last winter did include the "Green Lake Shellhouse".  But...

I'm not sure, but I think the building with the restrooms was still standing when I visited.  To be fair, the row of "sanican"s nearby has two hand-washing stations.

Now, Green Lake Park has its own mini-rescheduling situation.  The Community Center was supposed to be renovated.  This resulted in a truly horrifying story I've already told you, dear Diary, or anyway a truly horrifying part of an even more horrifying story, in which I found out the water wasn't running in the men's room only after using the toilet there.  During an atmospheric river.  Let's just say the Community Center's renovations matter to me.  So now, having already inflicted damage preparing for those renovations, they're not doing them after all.  All this I already knew.

But imagine my surprise to find that instead a different set of restrooms at Green Lake Park is fenced away, to be torn down and replaced.  Green Lake Park just can't win for losing, can it?

March 22nd

Before I took any photos that day, I saw a man come out of the restroom in Greenwood Park.  Which is just like the restroom in Little Brook Park, essentially a wooden box, certainly not heated.  So this was proof that the parks department had pivoted back to its regular roster of restrooms to open.

Obstinately, I kept hiking anyway.  Again, I made it to five parks:  Sandel Playground, Greenwood Park, Licton Springs Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, and Waldo J. Dahl Playfield.

Of course, I found four of these parks had open restrooms.  That's what happens outside winter, right?  (Well, except in Ravenna Park, and Gas Works Park, and ...)

And except in Licton Springs Park:

Notice, dear Diary, that this sign doesn't make any promises as to when the actual construction part will happen.

All for now, dear Diary.  What remains for this set of pages is to do some mapping and see if there's anything worth saying about that.  Probably Sunday or Monday.

But I'm currently, as the placeholder with which I started this page indicated, focusing on other areas of my life.  Longer term, I am promised at least eight weeks off work this summer, and intend to spend at least one of them doing something I haven't yet done for you at all, a summer hike of North Seattle.  I also hope to visit a few counties I may write about the rest of this year.

So probably one page early next week, and then maybe none for a while.  Happy days and nights as spring continues, dear Diary!

Gilman Playground and Woodland and Green Lake Parks Tonight

Dear Diary,

From downtown this evening I went to Fred Meyer in Ballard, the only other errand I'd left myself time to run today before tomorrow's hiking.  I'd mis-remembered an article in Publicola as implying that both the RVs adjacent to Green Lake Park, and the campers in Woodland Park, were to be swept soon.  This is not true; the article in fact specifically says the campers have until January.  But anyway, 

Oh, dear, dear Diary.  I've even told the city (in the form of the Seattle Public Library) my adress, but haven't told you.  I live on NE 64th St between Ravenna Boulevard and Green Lake Park.  So I figured I could walk home from Ballard, and look into Woodland Park on the way.  And from there, Gilman wasn't much of a stretch.

Gilman Playground

The restrooms, of course, remain closed - no park restrooms in southern Ballard stay open in winter.  (Ross Park's restrooms have to close in cold weather.  Gilman Playground's don't have to, but ought to close, so homeless people lose an alternative, because human Number Two is such an excellent decoration for Ballard's streets.  And Ballard Playground's restrooms don't at all have to close, they're in a much bigger building for crying out loud, but there's no way the people who live near there want their neighbourhood to have the only open park restrooms in Ballard.)

Anyway, the real news is that the water fountain, which had consistently run ever since my first visit in June 2020, even that winter, was off.

Well, I guess it deserved a rest after all that time, but I was a little shocked and more than a little disappointed to find that.  I didn't take any photos there.

Woodland Park

This was a pretty focused visit; I visited the three restroom buildings in the western, upper, part of "Lower" Woodland Park, and some of the water fountains in that area.

I found the men's room of the "50th St" restrooms open at 7:40 P.M., the women's room closed, according to the sign due to a "malfunction or freeze".  The nearby water fountain, though considerably repaired before the last time I'd seen it, wasn't running then, so I wasn't in the least surprised that it wasn't running tonight, as nightly lows head towards the point when most water fountains really need to be shut down.  (Hing Hay Park's water fountain has been shut off for nearly a week, although the one in "lower" Ravenna Park was still running Friday night.)

So, um, I was pretty unprepared for this:

That's one of the two fountains attached to the "Pink Palace" building in the centre-west of "Lower" Woodland Park.  As with most of the fountains I've found running lately (Magnuson, Ravenna, Bitter Lake, not so much downtown), its drain is blocked with sand, but it's exuberantly running.  Now, I've argued, as long ago as November 2020, that water fountains attached to heated restroom buildings are, based on Jackson Park's experience, good choices to keep on in winter.  I haven't noticed Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation paying much attention to that argument, though, and based on what I found tonight in Gilman, here, and at Green Lake, I strongly suspect the fountains still running at this point are simply those near remaining homeless encampments in or near the parks.  (Ravenna is a counter-argument, but its fountains' harder water may give them a bit more leeway with cold.)

The rest of the social contract that seems to me to have existed between the campers and the parks staff at Woodland Park has survived, so far, to varying degrees.   I checked all the shelters, something I've previously had trouble doing at night, but tonight a full moon helped, and so did Christmas lights at three of the shelters, including two in the southern area where I hadn't previously seen good evidence of electricity at all.  All remain occupied except for shelter 7, where I'm profoundly disappointed to have to report that only one bench remains; all the other benches and tables are gone, presumably for use as firewood.  I found not only electrical cables, but also water hoses, running across a street in the north of the park from shelter 6.

Where the social contract has most obviously broken down, besides the stolen furniture, is in trash handling.  Lots of bags haven't been picked up.  Possibly in reaction to that, lots of trash is now there unbagged, including at the presumably former pick-up stop adjacent to that water fountain whose photo I showed you, dear Diary, pages and pages ago.  There are two water fountains there, adjacent, but the one on the right, nearer in this photo, though also running, has a small bag in its bowl.

But actually, the program that supplies trash removal to encampments includes supplying bags, so I'm guessing both removal and bags are no longer available.  One of the best things mayor Jenny Durkan ever did for homeless people was to ramp that program way, way up early in the lockdown, and then the City Council doubled her request for its 2021 budget.  So maybe this is just a blip, depleted funds, and come New Year's Day garbage removal at Woodland Park will resume, and the campers will have a lot of tidying to do.  Or maybe, since their sweep is planned for January, nobody will bother.  Dunno.

Anyway, I also found the fountain running at shelter 6, which had not been running the last time I visited, in, um, October.  So what the heck is going on here?  My guess is that parks staff are continuing to bend over backwards to be nice to the Woodland Park campers, even with them the most likely suspects in the denudation of shelter 7, and the trash problem is just the blip I speculate about above.  Maybe the parks people are aware that the tiny house village spots that had been planned for the campers have gone elsewhere, so the campers probably face a pretty bleak future after January, the past eighteen or so months probably the best of the homeless parts of their lives, and parks employees are being models of forbearance in the meantime.  But anyway, after I tell you, dear Diary, that I found the "Pink Palace" men's room open but the women's, and both "lawn bowling" ones, closed, and that all the door shots are at the Google Drive folder, that's it for Woodland Park.

Except that I still hadn't found a single sweep notice.  I've recently seen a sweep near where I work, and although nobody played entirely fair there, still, there was a notice, and it wasn't hard to find.  So why not at Woodland?  Because I got the date wrong, of course, but the point is, then I went on to Green Lake Park to look for the notice there (as well as because it was on my way home, of course).

Green Lake Park

Of course, what that Publicola article actually said was that only those camping along West Green Lake Way N are to be swept.  And they did get a notice, but it took a strange form.

For me, this is fitting.  My mother was widowed when I was 8, and I went through high school young, from 11 to 15.  So she refused to let me take driver's ed, because it would send her auto insurance rates skyrocketing, and I'd never been able to afford it, time and money at the same time, since.  As a result, I'm one of the few Americans for whom "gas" and "parking" don't have similar visceral resonance to, say, "electricity" and "phone".  I can intellectually understand when people say the vehicular homeless have huge extra worries, specifically gas and parking, but it just basically doesn't make sense to me.  So of course, given that I don't understand them, I'd expect their sweeps to take a different form.  And that they do:

Ho ho ho!  Happy Christmas!

That notice includes a URL which the Seattle Department of Transportation, which posted it, says explains about "temporary no parking zones".  This it does.  Temporary no parking zones are things private companies and individuals normally pay SDOT for permission to impose, and that's all well explained, and indeed mapped, at that site.  But zones imposed by SDOT itself for sweeping purposes?  The site certainly does not enable one to find those (not even through the map's GIS features).  The particular temporary no parking zone of interest here isn't even on the map yet:

SDOT seems determined to play the Grinch this year.

Mind, the Publicola report also refers to tents in Green Lake Park near all those vehicles, and I did see some tonight, and even exchange greetings with a resident.  So does "No Parking" cover them, too?  Or where is their sweep notice?

I certainly didn't find it at the Green Lake Small Craft Center, where the restrooms were open (well, it wasn't 9 P.M. yet).  The restrooms were also open at the "65th St" location, as they should be.  The latter has no water fountains, but those at the Small Craft Center were running.  These, too, are attached to buildings that are presumably heated all winter, so again, they fit my advocacy.  Problem is, the Woodland Park shelter 6 water fountain is free-standing, and if that shelter were heated, well, shelter 7 would still have its furniture.  So I think the water fountains still running in Woodland and Green Lake Parks are still running, not because, in a normal Seattle winter, they can safely run most of the time (as Gilman Playground's free-standing fountain showed last winter, when there were homeless in that place), but just only because the parks department is trying to be nice to the campers.

Which is certainly a happier thing to close on than what SDOT is preparing to do to the campers' more mobile peers.

Good night, dear Diary.  Tomorrow, I hope to hike the parks of northeastern downtown, and finish that series at last, except for the artist credits.

Woodland and Green Lake Parks Today

Dear Diary,

Surprise!  I got antsy enough today to go on another hike.

Unfortunately, this turned out to mean another walk through Green Lake Park through an atmospheric river.  My phone didn't react as badly as last time (immortalised in your pages, dear Diary, as "Escaping Green Lake Park, part two" and "Fear of Rain") but I still don't want to connect it to the computer, which may increase the risk of a short-circuit.  I took 47 photos, most of which are water fountain and restroom door shots meant for the Google Drive folders (Woodland, Green Lake), which I hope I can upload today.  But even the exceptions, the ones meant only for you, dear Diary, I may not be able to show you today.  I've left double spaces around the places that I want to put them.  (EDIT 10/25:  They're in now.  My phone survived.)

I skipped the water fountain at the far northwest corner of Woodland Park, for reasons I'll explain.

I started from the northeast corner of Woodland Park, walked south to 50th, then along 50th before turning north again.  I then walked not down West Green Lake Way, but an internal Woodland Park road roughly parallel to it, to enter Green Lake Park near the shellhouse at the lake's southern end.  From there I walked counter-clockwise around the circum-lake trail, past the 64th St and Community Center restrooms to the Bathhouse ones, then moved (and high time, too) to the trail around the edge of the park to visit the wading pool (north) restrooms and the outlying water fountain.

Woodland Park

Erica Barnett at Publicola has recently reported that a sweep of Woodland Park is imminent.  Usually, when she reports something like this, I find myself days too late to actually witness the sweep; in the case of what is currently your most popular page, dear Diary, I was only hours too late.  One of the main reasons many people have been demanding a sweep is that the city has, for many months now, kept both the roads I just mentioned - West Green Lake Way and the internal park road parallel to it - closed; I and also those making these demands believe that these closures were intended to protect a peculiarly favoured homeless encampment centred on the shelters in the western half of the eastern block of Woodland Park.  There have also been demands for a sweep because the presence of so many homeless people prompted enough fear among some housed people that an important annual cross-country track event has been cancelled two years running.

As I approached Woodland Park, I could see cars driving up West Green Lake Way, and concluded that I was days too late once again.

Cloverleaf - Where the four smaller baseball fields along Green Lake Way meet, at the end of a path that continues Clogston Way, there's a building whose roof forms part of the stands for one of the fields.  This building has inside it two restrooms.  These restrooms are normally seasonal, closed sometime in November and opened sometime in March or so, but were considered safe to open limited hours last winter and will probably be opened similarly this coming one, because the other restrooms in the athletic eastern quarter of Woodland Park are closed.  There is a water fountain attached to the building.  I found both restrooms open and the water fountain running strongly.  I delayed a quarter hour because someone of whose gender I was uncertain was standing in front of the women's room sink that entire time, probably making up presumably her face, and finally tried a couple of complicated shots to work around ?her presence.  During that quarter hour I read the front section of today's paper, which I had with me to date the photos.  This turned out to be a good thing.

"Rio" (Citywide Athletics building) - This is a smaller building nestled between the bigger baseball diamond and a soccer field.  The COVID testing site run by Curative is currently still near it, as reported last spring.  Its restrooms were closed today, and the men's room is boarded up, with a sign on the boards announcing it's closed due to vandalism.

The baseball diamond to the south has two water fountains near the first- and third-base dugouts.  Both had been eviscerated by metal thieves when I first visited them in spring 2020.  On this occasion, my first visit since April or May this year, I found running water fountains of the same make there, whether representing major repairs or outright replacement.

Woodland Park Ave - Some way north of where this street ends at 50th, there's a solitary water fountain of an old-fashioned make.  I found it damaged last year, and discerned no repairs so far.

50th St - To the north and west of that water fountain is a restroom building with an extremely old-fashioned water fountain south of it (on the men's room side).  I found both restrooms open (although the women's room door has a damaged "Restroom Closed" sign still taped to it), and the water fountain, which had been damaged since I first saw it, now has a spout again, but still doesn't run.

This restroom building is there mainly because of three shelter buildings (Woodland Park's shelters 1 to 3) north of it, on the inside of a loop drive.  Occupation of this area by homeless people during the pandemic has been hit or miss; the main attraction of Woodland Park has been the electricity available from at least one shelter, but none of these shelters have that or even sinks.  That said, this area obviously has not yet been swept.  I didn't even see any of the signs that have recently been posted before sweeps.  I did see signs obviously meant to deter sweeps, similarly on red paper, as follows:

I went north and uphill to the other shelter area, in which four shelters are strung along more or less north-south roads, 7, 4, 5, 6.  Shelter 7 to the south has been the least occupied, but on two visits I'd found campers near it; this time the whole area was empty.

 

Shelters 4 and 5 didn't appear to be empty.

At the top of the hill, the terminus of the park-internal road that sort of parallels West Green Lake Way, is a restroom building that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation calls the "Pink Palace" because it's very noticeably pink.  Its restrooms were open (though the women's room gate had another "Restroom Closed" sign), and the attached water fountains, which I'd found running on no previous hike, were running today.  If I had to guess, I'd guess most of the water fountain work in Woodland Park postdates the June heat wave.  I took two hikes in early July, found lots of water fountains on, and stopped worrying; this hike today was the one I most regretted not doing then.

One of the hallmarks of the encampment around this area has been extension cords used to carry electricity around from the shelter that supplies it to other shelters and to tents.  I remarked on their curtailment in March.  I found this time that they still aren't crossing the main road, but there is again electricity on the other side, around shelter 4, thanks to a circuitously routed cord.

At the northwest corner of this block stands a restroom building the parks department calls "lawn bowling" after the nearby greens.  This is normally a seasonal pair of restrooms; I remember asking Rachel Schulkin of the parks department about them, and her telling me that the manager was trying his best to keep them open.  Over last winter, the "Pink Palace" and "50th St" restrooms were usually open 24 hours, but the lawn bowling pair were only open the same limited hours as the cloverleaf pair.  In any event, they were open this afternoon. 

Under the northern eaves of this building stands a water fountain within the lawn bowling greens' fences.  Today for the first time I found the gate near that water fountain open.

 

As on a previous occasion when lawn bowlers opened it for me, the water fountain wasn't running.  I have no idea whether that's because of damage or the fence.  (In Tacoma there are many fenced athletic areas, available only by reservation.  I was told by the park worker who let me into one that this resulted in their water fountains never working; but actually, one of the two at that location was on that night.)

Near shelter 6, which I believe to be the main source of electricity (although I suspect what's now crossing to shelter 4 is from the "Pink Palace" instead), is a water fountain.  Last fall, after the city bowed to public health's demands that it turn on the fountains, that was one of only two in Woodland Park that ran (the other was the cloverleaf fountain mentioned above).  It was not running today.

Shelter 6 is the only shelter other than shelter 7 not swathed in tarps today.  It isn't empty like shelter 7; there's a table of books at one end of the shelter and what looks like a table of utensils at the sinkward end.  But none of the cloth, tarps, and whatnot that had made it homelike last autumn for a woman, and later at least kitchenlike last winter and spring for a group of men, remains.

One possible reason the evident enthusiasm for running water fountains didn't reach the fountains at the lawn bowling green and shelter 6 is that there are extension cords across the road near there.  I think this is more likely to have been accepted as a good excuse to skip those fountains (conceivably even by agreement among some park workers and some campers), than to be the result of extremely pugnacious campers who wouldn't even temporarily detach those cords.

In my trip today, the rain got a lot steadier around here.  I reflected on the fact that the water fountain near Woodland Park Ave is the same make as the water fountain at the park's northwest corner, that is, the northwest corner of the block the Woodland Park Zoo is on, and decided that the latter fountain was unlikely to have been repaired and I didn't need to cross Aurora to verify that.

Green Lake Park

At the south end of the lake used to be a Shellhouse Theatre or some such.  One part of their seating survives.  Clockwise along the trail from there are the two buildings of the current Green Lake Small Craft Center.  One of those buildings holds two restrooms, which I found open.  Each building has attached to it one water fountain, which ran during the first drought of spring 2020, but not during the second one of spring 2021.  Both were running today.

Green Lake Park's circum-lake trail had, for all the months of my acquaintance with it, a profusion of signs.  "Crowded Parks Lead to Closed Parks".  "Wrong Way".  And so on, and so on, and so on.  I saw basically none of these today.  Indeed it was far from clear whether we were still in pandemic-time rules, in which wheels were barred and everyone walked counter-clockwise, or in regular rules, which are completely different.

I, like most people, went counter-clockwise, not least because that's how I'd planned the hike.  Counter-clockwise, then, the next restrooms, the parks department calls "65th Street" because they're near where 64th Street ends at East Green Lake Way.  Ahem.  The official 24-hour restrooms of Green Lake Park used to be further north, but perhaps because of the encampment relatively nearby, last winter the 64th St restrooms were officially open 24 hours instead.  (In reality, both pairs were normally open 24 hours.)  Unsurprisingly, I found the 64th St restrooms open today.  I've never found a water fountain near them.

The Green Lake Community Center has restrooms whose doors open to the outside.  Last winter there was renovation going on, resulting in unpredictable access to those restrooms and, separately, unpredictable water supply.  Thankfully, not only were they open today, but also the men's room, at least, had both warm and cold running water and unblocked toilets.  (However, the men's room was less affected by the renovation throughout, so the women's room may or may not have the same.)  The water fountain trailward of the Community Center was running.

As I walked north from the Community Center the wind got considerably stronger.  I had to furl my umbrella, which did not do wonders for my comfort or the cohesion of the newspaper front section I was carrying to date the photos.  The wind started to break branches off trees and whip them at the people walking the trail, including me; I found seven tiny twigs in my hair while writing this page, dear Diary.  This made me more certain that my planned path, arguably shorter and not requiring me to go back along the lowest parts of the lake trail, was the right one.  So on I went to the Bathhouse Theater.

This building's restrooms have doors that open to the outside, but they're one of three sets of those in North Seattle that officially open only in summer, when I generally avoid hiking.  (The other two are in Magnuson Park and at Matthews Beach).  However, they were open last winter.  I did not find them open today.  There's a freestanding water fountain near the men's room, running today, and attached fountains on the other side of the women's room (lakeward), also running today.

So then I went out to the park's edge, and started back clockwise.  This brought me to the usual official 24-hour restrooms, near the northernmost point of the lake; the parks department refers to these restrooms as "wading pool" after a nearby feature.  They weren't the official 24-hour restrooms last winter, but were open 24 hours most nights anyhow.  Of course I found them open.  The water fountains attached to the building were running, as was the freestanding water fountain nearby.  (EDIT 10/25:  I didn't end up with photos of that fountain, and am not positive I checked that it was running.  Sorry, dear Diary.)  The newspaper section was disintegrating, and my phone was doing weird stuff all the time.  This was pretty much the trip's nadir.

So from there I went back to the park's edge and looked for a freestanding water fountain I'd found this spring for the first time, around where 72nd St intersects East Green Lake Drive.  This fountain had run for a while and then been vandalised.  I think it's been partly fixed, but it still doesn't have a spout, and I didn't hear water when I pushed the button.

The weather suddenly turned much nicer around the time I took the last photo, and I made my way home.  The last stop was the neighbourhood shop where I'd bought the paper; I bought another copy, because it was hopeless to salvage the section I'd carried all that way.

Dear Diary, I don't understand why I didn't see sweep notices already up, and why it looks like things have improved again for the campers at Woodland Park.  The most important change is that the roads are open (and the park-internal road seeing frequent but not constant use), but at least by day, I didn't see vigilantes trying to harm the campers.  I find it hard to believe our present mayor has finally decided to be nice to homeless people, but that hypothesis fits the current facts better than any other I can think of.  Perhaps sometime in the coming days the confusion will be reduced.  But for now, the people in Woodland Park remain relatively fortunate among the unsheltered homeless of this pandemic, as, of course, still more so, am I.  Good night, dear Diary.

Yesterday's Hike in More Detail

Dear Diary,

As I told you last night, I visited thirteen parks yesterday, hiking from about 8:30 A.M. to about 7:30 P.M. to do it.  I can't do that every day, if only because then I'd never be able to tell you about it at all.  So today I'm writing in you instead of hiking.

This hike covered everything left west of I-5 except for five NW sites:  Ballard Commons, Ballard Community Center and Playground, Loyal Heights Community Center and Playfield, Salmon Bay Park, and Webster Park.  I also tidied up a loose end between I-5 and Lake City Way NE.  There may be a similar loose end west of I-5 among the parks I visited yesterday, but otherwise most of what's left is the entire set of parks east of both I-5 and Lake City Way NE, fifteen parks, including such convenient, easily visited ones as Cedar Park and Magnuson Park.  Oh, well.

I hope to visit all twenty remaining parks - specifically, all restrooms and water fountains in them - before the month is over, but we'll see.  Meanwhile, yesterday, first by function, then by park.

Most of the photos, as for the previous hike, are in a public folder at my Google Drive account, URL:

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

Most photos in this page aren't in that folder, however.

Restrooms - Closed at Licton Springs Park.  I speculate that this is to discourage the unbelievably messy campers who were there last year from returning.  However, it's also possible that whoever opened restrooms yesterday morning just forgot this park, so I suppose I should go back a couple of times, as I did with Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, which I finally found open yesterday morning.  Otherwise, open; this includes Northacres Park (two pairs of restrooms, which I identify as park and playfield), Bitter Lake Playfield, Carkeek Park, Greenwood Park (only one restroom, and my photo happened to catch a wide beam of light coming in through one of the peepholes), Sandel Playground, Soundview Playfield, and Golden Gardens Park (two pairs of restrooms, which I identify as upper and lower).

For most of the men's or all-gender rooms, I took notes of how many of each major item it had, and tested the sinks and dryers by starting the water running, waving my hand around trying to get the water to splash me, and then drying my hand off (if there was a dryer).  By default, for each park for which I list items, the sink did not splash me, and the dryer, if any, worked.  I note exceptions.

Water fountains - Running at Bitter Lake Playfield (fountain near the playground, which I hadn't noticed before), Licton Springs Park, Greenwood Park, and Crown Hill Park.  Present (including the southern Golden Gardens Park water fountain, which I hadn't seen either in October or in January, and fountains I observed for the first time at Carkeek and Green Lake Parks) but not running at the rest, except for Baker Park on Crown Hill, where I finally found people other than me who attested the absence of the water fountain.

By park:

Maple Leaf Reservoir Park

As noted above, the third try was the charm.  This is the second series of hikes on which I've had trouble with this park's restrooms not being open; so I'm guessing this isn't coincidence, but a park whose restrooms are often forgotten, or opened last and closed first, by door openers.  This park has a free-standing double water fountain, and one of those is one of the fountains for which my photo doesn't include my finger pressing the button.  The men's room has one toilet with a stall door, one urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.

It appears currently to be illegal to walk 1st Ave NE from 95th St to 103rd St owing to construction on both sides of the street having closed both the sidewalk on one side and the shoulder on the other.  Luckily, no police were around when I did so.

Northacres Park

I started with the playfield side, which one approaches via 3rd Ave NE.  The water fountain there is unusually full of stuff that is unlikely to allow it to function well in whatever far-off day water fountains are allowed to run in North Seattle again:

The playfield side men's room has two toilets without stall doors, a wide urinal that without social distancing would easily fit two men and with difficulty three, one sink with a really wide counter, one dryer and one soap dispenser.  This men's room sink has delivered water under such high pressure that most of it ends up on the user's clothes ever since I first visited this park last May.

The parks department probably refers to the other set of restrooms as "playground" or "pg" (I can't be sure because the map I hiked last January to check still doesn't admit that these are open), but since Northacres's signage refers to "Northacres Park and Playfield", I figure the non-playfield part is simply the "park".  Anyway, these rooms are single-user stalls, and in Seattle parks in general, that means what it means here:  one toilet, one sink, one dryer, one soap dispenser, and no urinals.  I forgot to check the sinks and dryers at this location.

The water fountains here are designed to run all winter, but were shut off last winter.  I've complained about this before, attributing my knowledge to an employee of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation whom I met at this location last spring.  However, it turns out I had another source of information:

I was told last winter that the department's plumber averred that the department owns no winter-proof water fountains.  So is this water fountain an interloper owned by some nefarious third party, or was he wrong?  Or is he simply helping cover up the extent of the current city government's reluctance to provide water?

From Northacres it's a pretty easy and quick hike across, um, Aurora to the next park.

Bitter Lake Playfield

It seems Bitter Lake Playfield is soon to be blest with its own lack of urinals.  Right now the men's room there has one toilet with a stall door, one urinal, one sink, one dryer and one soap dispenser.  I used the urinal, being unsure what some spots on the toilet's seat were.  However:

Plans are afoot to renovate these restrooms, about a year from now, and turn them into single-user all-gender stalls.  This conversion, seems to me, normally has two effects:  it reduces the total number of stalls available; and it gets rid of urinals.

Perhaps the sight of a urinal is traumatic to some women and/or transgender people.  But the sight of yellow spots on a toilet seat is irksome to a whole lot more women, and some of pretty much every other category of human.  The usual response to this argument seems to be that men should be better than we, in fact, are; in other words, it's wishful thinking, or perhaps punitive thinking - until men are perfect, it's better that everyone suffer.  I have the impression that over the longer term, this conversion is likely to come to many parks, so people in Seattle in general, and in the area around Bitter Lake right now, should assess whether they're OK with this probable result, and if not, speak up.

As for reduction:  Why on Earth, having lived through the current pandemic, would anyone think fewer park restroom stalls is a good idea?  Why hasn't this experience driven a stake through the unbeating heart of this process?  Inquiring minds want to know.

In the meantime, in a photo that is at the Google Drive folder, someone seems, this past winter, to have expressed displeasure at the "sanican"s that alone were available:

PubliCola has just reported on the evil deeds of the terrorist pedophiliac Satanists who camp in this park, which include starting both the COVID-19 epidemic and World War II, and now we can add illegal fires to the long list of their crimes.

I dawdled on the way to the next park to wait for an advertised garage sale to open.  I bought a book there.

Carkeek Park

A few feet to the side of the Environmental Learning Center's "sanican", the one that's now locked each night against intruders (but nobody was keeping watch by day to enforce its notional restriction to certain users) - anyway, a few feet to the side, sits one of the oldest water fountains in North Seattle:

It's similar to one in Woodland Park, the one adjacent to the N 50th St restrooms, and not to anything else in North Seattle.  It looks like it could have been made by the same people who made the shut-down water fountain in Freeway Park that's obviously over a century old.

I'm ashamed that I allowed my aversion to "sanican"s to blind me to this fountain's existence for so long.  To be a little more precise:  I've explored the ELC on, I think, each visit, and can easily imagine that I'd seen the fountain before but not recognised it for what it is.  But in general, once I knew there were no restrooms with doors opening outside in the ELC, it fell off my priority list, and I'm pretty sure at least one or two explorations were by night.  Oops.

Oh, and by the way.  Carkeek Park is by far big enough to have two or even three or four pairs of restrooms.  I presume the reason it doesn't is that the ELC has restrooms.  However, the parks department's web page listing ELCs currently says:  "Though the Environmental Learning Center at Carkeek Park is available for rentals, we regret that because of budget reductions, it is no longer open to the public."  Oops.  Carkeek Park should get more restrooms of its own.

Of course, it does already have restrooms of its own, a mile or so from the ELC.  These are amazingly large, as if quantity could make up for distance.  The men's room has three toilets with doors, an oversized urinal as at Northacres playfield, two sinks, one soap dispenser, and no dryers.  The sinks do not splash clothes.

In order to check the water fountain at the Eddie McAbee Entrance, as well as to go south, I left the park by the Piper's Creek trail, the same one described in "Escaping Carkeek Park".  This is the trail by which I entered it for the second time last spring, and at that time I described, in "The Ballard Seacoast" part II, 

| many deteriorating posts advertising 

| a "story trail" whose text can be found various places, 

| including online.  They date to 2004 and aren't online any 

| more, not even at the Internet Archive.  Maybe a physical 

| copy survives.

Unfortunately, I didn't take, or at least didn't show you, dear Diary, a photo of these posts, and now they're gone; I thought so in January and now am sure.  I did find a couple of signs branded "Salmon Stories", but they aren't new and I saw only two.

However, many posts seem to have held signs of about that size in the past, but to have had them removed, presumably by vandals.  So maybe "Salmon Stories" was some sort of successor to "Story Trail", but it isn't any more, and now "Story Trail" itself has been not only forgotten, but also erased.  Not only does this mean I can't now show you a picture of the posts, dear Diary - and a quick Google Image Search turns up none as well - but I also doubt I still have the URL they used to be at, which was on those posts.

As your next page will make clear, dear Diary, I care about stories, and I care about cultural loss, so this bothers me more than it may bother other people.  Maybe I should go on to the next park, but anyway, I want to register my unhappiness with this decision.  [EDIT 5/23:  No, the next page didn't make that clear; I was in a hurry, and forgot.]

Licton Springs Park

As I said, the trash is gone:

But I assume the restrooms' closure is a lingering effect of that trash and the reprehensible homeless people who left it.  The water fountains are running; I'd set out with two full bottles of water that morning, so as not to have to turn aside to buy water, but by this point in the afternoon had drunk more than one.  So I filled the empty bottle there, and if the water didn't taste great, it was certainly good enough, and I drank most of it before getting home.

Greenwood Park

Restroom open, water fountain running.

Sandel Playground

Restrooms open, water fountain off.

Baker Park on Crown Hill

Last October, I visited this park, unlike most parks without water fountains, because the parks department's web page claims it has one.  I also asked people who were there - young parents - if they knew anything, but they all said they hadn't been visiting the park long enough to be aware of any water fountains.

Well, I tried that again this time, but got the same results.

Finally I plucked up my courage and approached the party in one corner of the park.  They appeared to be a group who knew each other from some combination of school and/or work, probably all in their twenties but probably not early twenties.  Their first reaction was to offer me alcohol (like the mayor!), then they found some fizzy water and offered me that, but several of them were quite definite that they remembered the park's re-opening from renovations last year, and did not remember a water fountain being present then or since.

So it isn't just my imagination.  There really isn't a water fountain at this park, and I'm wondering how long the parks department is going to go on advertising its presence without actually installing the thing.

I stumbled on something odd in the pavement that might be, but probably isn't, the intended hookup; this picture is at the Google Drive folder, being all there was to photograph of the supposed Baker Park on Crown Hill water fountain:

Oh, darn, it isn't even in the pavement.

Crown Hill Park

This park is adjacent to a playground that used to belong to a school.  Now the building in question is a landlord to non-profits, and the playground was inherited by some sort of child care center, which promised to keep the playground open to the public on a similar basis to what the school had offered.  This promise is still not being kept, nearly a year after my first visit:

There were girls' games going on in the ballfields at both this park and Soundview Playfield, but here they had a working water fountain, while there they had restrooms.

Soundview Playfield

Soundview Playfield's restrooms distinctively have no signage at all.  No "men's" or "women's" or even "all-gender".  Just nothing.  The photos at the Google Drive folder, dear Diary, make this clear, since the single-user stalls here are hard to prop open, so I just shot the fact that I could open them enough to stick my newspaper in.

Perhaps the absence of the "all-gender" label is how they get away with having a different suite of features from those at, say, Laurelhurst Community Center, or Northacres Park park-side:  Each stall has one toilet, one urinal, one sink, one or two dryers (the old one in the south-facing stall doesn't work), and one soap dispenser.  It's easy to imagine that this old-looking building was originally meant for male athletes only, and that's why the stalls both have urinals.  But anyway, they show that it's at least physically, if not culturally, possible to put urinals into single-user stalls.  The girls I saw dealing with the south-facing stall did in fact get grossed out, but by a spider, not by the urinal.

The south-facing stall's sink has, as I previously reported, a sink whose water pressure is so strong that way too much of it lands on clothing.  In this case I didn't dodge fast enough, and since I had my vaccination card in my shirt pocket, this was a sub-optimal result; but the card seemed undamaged in the end.  The east-facing stall's sink is just fine.

The water fountain is not on.  Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for the parks department, told me last October that all the water fountains that could be turned on had been.  I hope in general that this isn't true - all those fountains with busted controls - but in this particular case I think it's realistic to hope it isn't true, because the water fountain is near a water play area that isn't on, so it's plausible that they can't turn the one on without the other.

Golden Gardens Park

Was crowded, as usual.  Both pairs of restrooms were open, and I have to revise my previous statement that the beach pair is extra-capacious.  The upper pair, usually referred to in relation to the off-leash area for dogs' people nearby, has a men's room with two toilets that lack stall doors, a wide urinal as at Carkeek and Northacres Parks, a sink, a soap dispenser, and no dryer.  The lower men's room has one toilet with a stall door, two urinals (as opposed to the just-described wide urinals), one sink, one soap dispenser, and one dryer.  There were two men in safety fluorescent vests, parks department employees, in the doorway of the lower women's room when I went to photograph it; one walked away, the other told me yes, they were there to close it, but while I photographed the open doorway he walked away, and I'm not sure when they did get around to actually closing the restrooms.  I saw them later directing traffic; they seemed assigned to the park for the day.

[The above paragraph edited later the same day.  The upper restrooms' toilets don't have stall doors; I'd mis-read my notes.]

The last two times I visited Golden Gardens Park I didn't find the south water fountain.  It is now clear to me that this is because I didn't go far enough south.  More precisely, in October I left via the Burke-Gilman Trail.  The south water fountain is so far south that it's essentially adjacent to the Eddie Vine Boat Ramp; the trail is some distance from it.  And in January I didn't even try; my whole visit to this park was while I waited for a friend to bring a replacement cart, so I rushed.

Like other water fountains I saw on this hike, it's weird.  But that photo (which is at Google Drive) is timed 6:51 P.M.  I noted the time as I passed the open doorways of the upper restrooms:  7:09 P.M.  So I didn't go on to Loyal Heights Playfield.

Green Lake Park

Later that evening I passed a park water fountain where I didn't at all expect one, though many people walk past it every day.  It's at the intersection of East Green Lake Way N and NE 72nd St.  I showed you, dear Diary, a picture of it in the previous page, and my other picture of it (with newspaper) is at Google Drive, so there's no point in reproducing either photo here, but the entire control is gone.  There is something metallic just inside there, seeming loose.  I think it's extremely unlikely that metal thieves came and restrained themselves to only taking the controls, because taking that next piece would just be greedy, so this only strengthens my belief that control damage is usually not done by conscious evildoers, but by parks employees, for reasons I'll discuss in a page a week or two away.

Anyway, that's what I saw in and around Seattle parks yesterday, dear Diary.  I hope still to write one more page in you tonight, and after that we'll see what happens.  Happy hours, or perhaps days...