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.

My February Hikes

Dear Diary,

To start with, I planned to tackle all the parks with restrooms in one region of North Seattle, that is, NE, N and NW, in one day off each.  In reality, on February 19th I visited the majority of NE parks; on February 26, the majority of NW (adding one on the 28th); on March 5 a few in NE and N; on March 12 only Salmon Bay Park; and on March 19 most of N.  (In each region I started in the north, to keep myself from focusing as usual on the closer-together parks further south.)  On March 22 (my day off had switched), I visited the parks of Greenwood and east of there, which were most of what was left, but it was already too late to evaluate their restrooms' winter availability.

In your previous page, dear Diary, I focused on the lists of park restrooms open in winter posted by Christina Hirsch in 2019 and in 2022.  In particular, I noted that of four restrooms or restroom pairs added to the 2022 list in North Seattle, three appeared to be outright lies (University Playground's restroom doors welded shut; Little Brook Park's restroom posted as seasonally closed; Salmon Bay Park's restrooms locked on two visits) and one, at best, a conflict between Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation management and the parks maintenance workers who actually open, clean, do minor repairs on, and close the restrooms, that is, Sandel Playground's restrooms, which now in two winters (2020-2021 and 2022-2023) have been advertised as open but have instead been closed.

However, I found other interesting things on these hikes, including but not limited to more lies, and so plan two other pages to tell you about them, dear Diary.  This is the first, and covers NE and NW.

February 19th

I've now uploaded most of the photos to Google Drive.  For this hike, that means Magnuson Park, Matthews Beach, Little Brook Park, all visited between 1 and 4 pm; then University Playground, Cowen Park, Ravenna Park, Burke-Gilman Playground Park and View Ridge Playfield, between 4 P.M. and 9 P.M.  (The restrooms at Burke-Gilman Playground Park, which I reached at 7:20 P.M., both had visible seasonal closure notices still up; those at View Ridge Playfield, which I reached at 8:04 P.M., stay open all the time, 24/7.  For which I was very grateful by that time, because all the other open restrooms - Magnuson Park's beach restrooms and Matthews Beach's - had been early in the hike.)

I found the street-style fountain near the intersection of the Burke-Gilman Trail and 30th Ave NE not running.  I didn't check the park-style fountain further south.

Other notes:

Magnuson Park

As the previous page noted, without going out of my way re water fountains, I found four that were running, of which three were attached to heated buildings.  The fourth was in Magnuson Park.  It was running strongly:

I was concerned enough about this - cold weather was then forecast - to write to Rachel Schulkin, PR at the parks department.  But I thought there was a real chance that someone in charge at Magnuson Park was doing a controlled experiment, comparing an attached fountain with a free-standing one.  So I told her the fountains should be turned off unless they represented such an experiment.

I think I was worrying too much.  I've told you before, dear Diary, that while homeless I began tracking low temperatures in spreadsheets - a succession of these as the electronic gadgets where I kept them broke or were stolen.  (And as my standards changed.  I originally just listed temperature readings from signs I passed on my way to campus.)  The surviving version goes back to 2019, and I still go to some trouble to keep that spreadsheet up.

Now, 2022 was distinctive compared to the other years I still have, and as best I remember going further back.  I track three thermometers:  one at the roof of the UW's Atmospheric Sciences building, measured every minute by UW personnel; one at Boeing Field, measured every five minutes by the National Weather Service; and one at NOAA's building on the UW campus, a couple blocks south of the Atmospheric Sciences building and much closer to the water, measured every hour also by the National Weather Service.  Historically, my comments on the spreadsheet concerned almost only missed readings at one or another of these.  UW was usually the highest, NOAA often the lowest.  But in 2022, NOAA's readings started going haywire, very often dropping by 8º Fahrenheit for a single reading, sometimes two or three times in 24 hours.  I noted these but only recorded more believable lows.  My complaints about NOAA's readings got ever more baroque as these "swoops" became more frequent and more extreme (for a time they were consistently 11º F in extent).  Finally October 1st to 6th, neither NOAA nor UW gave credible readings; readings at both ranged 11º to 15º F throughout those days.  From October 7th to November 23rd, NOAA was credible, the UW not; but on November 24th, NOAA swooped eight times, and this pattern of frequent swoops making it un-useable as a data source has been its pattern basically ever since, except for a few weeks around New Year's.  On November 28th, the UW came back, and has been steady ever since.  I've since learnt, from my work on the counties, that actually the Weather Service has multiple stations whose temperature readings regularly swoop; I suspect the main brand of thermometer NWS relies on is maybe not up to being used outside for years on end.

Anyway, though, this melange of sources reported a bunch of temperatures in the 20s before February 19 of this year.  November 9th, 2022:  NOAA 29º (Boeing 30º).  November 18th through 20th (both NOAA and Boeing).  December 1st and 2nd, also the 15th and 16th (all Boeing; UW higher).  December 21st through 24th (both UW and Boeing, and going down to 16º).  January 30th, 2023 (both UW, at 29º, and Boeing, at 21º).  So when I found that fountain running on February 19th, one of two things had to be true:  Either it was equal to 16º temperatures, or it was being closely supervised by someone able and willing to turn it off when such temperatures threatened.

So I shouldn't have worried so much.  It looks like Seattle parks could have a lot more running water fountains in typical Seattle winters, although if the explanation is close supervision, that probably doesn't scale up too well.

I didn't find the showers at either Magnuson or Matthews beaches running.

Ravenna Park

Both the 2019 list and the 2022 list said Ravenna Park's lower restrooms were open.  I know from when you began, dear Diary, that the 2019 list was telling the truth.  The 2022 list was not, and I can't imagine why a list that had clearly been actively compiled included the long-term-closed restrooms at Ravenna Park.

February 26th

Again, most of the photos are now at Google Drive, including Carkeek Park, Golden Gardens Park, Soundview Playfield, Loyal Heights Community Center, Salmon Bay Park, Ballard Community Center, Ballard Commons, and also the street water fountain at Greenwood Ave and 85th St, which was near a place where I changed buses, and which I found running very strongly:

Carkeek Park

Carkeek Park is distinctive among the parks of North Seattle with regard to its restrooms:  It's the largest park with only one restroom location.  Jackson Park, the next largest, has only one location for restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and all its restrooms are in one small part of the park, but most of the park is a golf course, which apparently makes that OK.  Otherwise, the next smaller park with only one set of restrooms is Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, one-seventh the size of Carkeek Park.

The reason Carkeek Park can get away with having so few restrooms is partly that most of what's interesting in that park is near those restrooms - the beach, the playground, the picnic shelters.  It's also partly that, like Jackson Park, it used to have park restrooms whose doors open indoors.  But then the Environmental Learning Center at Carkeek Park, which is way off at the other end of the park, much closer to city streets, closed to the public, leaving Carkeek with only one set of restrooms.

So what's new is that one of the ELC buildings has re-opened to the public:

In 2010 it was open Tuesdays through Saturdays, but 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.  So the current schedule is nearly as many hours, though, as in many libraries, it's managed this largely by expanding morning hours.

The front of this building has a lot of glass:

Through this I could see the doors of the restrooms, and could also see a couple of people working.  But they weren't formally open, and I didn't want to bother them (partly because, after all, I hoped to finish NW that day).

Golden Gardens Park

I vaguely remember that the showers here were running, unlike those at Matthews Beach and Magnuson Park.  But my photos don't document this, and it could be a false memory.

February 28th

Gilman Playground

As with Burke-Gilman Playground Park, I got here outside my usual hours limits (6:06 P.M.), but it was OK because there were still closure signs on the doors.  At Google Drive see here.

All for now, dear Diary.  I'll write up the March hikes in the coming days as my schedule allows.  Until then, happy nights and days.

Happy Birthday, Dear Diary! Seattle Parks Lied Again!

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry for neglecting you for so long, and especially given that I left you on a cliffhanger, not knowing whether I'd become homeless over a month ago or had gotten a job at long last.

Well, it was the latter.  I've spent years of my life preparing people's taxes, and got a job by being willing to keep a tax office open the entirety of its open hours.  Which left me only one day off per week.

So I spent those days off hiking, but didn't even get around to uploading the photos to Google Drive timely, much less telling you, Dear Diary, about the hikes, with all the maps and other paraphernalia we've gotten used to.

Now that tax season is over, mirabile dictu, I still have a job, but with considerably fewer hours.  And I wanted to congratulate you on your third birthday, Dear Diary, with a preview of those hikes' results.

I'd told you before about the announcement by Christina Hirsch in November 2022 of which park restrooms would be open this winter.  It's her second such announcement, the first having appeared in 2019.  The 2019 list turned out to be a much better guide to which park restrooms in North Seattle were open during the winter of 2020-2021 than the map the city was then promoting as answering that question.  But by now, things have changed.  The 2022 list omits a few restrooms the 2019 list included:  Ballard Commons (which was fenced closed until March 12 of this year); Cal Anderson Park (sort of:  it's listed this time as having had "portables", but the 2019 list had no such note); Discovery Park's beach restrooms; Green Lake Park's Bathhouse restrooms (which I nevertheless found open).

And it adds a ton of others, eighteen, near as I can count.  Only four of these are in North Seattle, and in my own November 2022 discussion I expressed surprise about three of these.  I didn't find any of the four actually open.

On Sunday, February 19th, at 3:08 P.M., Little Brook Park's restroom (yes, only one) was closed with a seasonal closure sign posted:

At 4:17 P.M. that day, I found University Playground's restrooms not only closed, but welded closed:

On Sunday, February 26th at 6:33 P.M., I found Salmon Bay Park's restrooms closed.  I didn't think they looked like they'd been used recently, but the thing is, park restroom hours are 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. most times of the year, and I was trying, in these hikes, to be extremely fair to Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, by limiting my hikes to 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.  So I went back to Salmon Bay Park on Sunday, March 12th at 5:47 P.M.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, March 5th, I'd reached Sandel Playground at 6:06 P.M., technically outside my limits, but I mean, really.  Of the many lies I caught the parks department in during the winter of 2020-2021, the only one that took Ms. Hirsch's colleague Rachel Schulkin by surprise was that Sandel Playground's restrooms were closed.  They hadn't been in the 2019 list, but in 2020-2021 they were supposed to have been open, and weren't.  The same happened in 2022-2023:

I wasn't able to get back to Sandel Playground before 6 P.M. until Wednesday, March 22nd, and having already found Greenwood Park's restroom, a twin to Little Brook Park's, open that day, was unsurprised to find Sandel Playground's restrooms open too.

Basically, I think none of the four additions in North Seattle was real, and three were outright lies.  The question I had, though, was whether that was Ms. Hirsch's little joke on you, dear Diary, and me, or whether the parks department was really inflating its winter restroom numbers city-wide.  I thought if those four were the only additions, that would be a give-away, but actually there were fourteen other additions, none of which I got a chance to visit.  Dear Diary, you've been visited a lot ever since I signed up at an active job-hunting site, but I'm not sure how many of those visits have been by actual human beings.  But if anyone who reads this can comment on whether restrooms were open this past winter in the following parks, I'd be very grateful:

1. Alki Beach - Was listed only once in 2019, but with three locations in 2022.  So two of 63rd, 57th and Bath House should've been open besides the one that was open then.
2. Alki Beach - The other new one.
3. Beer Sheva Park.
4. Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park.
5. Hiawatha.
6. Magnolia Community Center.  The 2019 list included only Community Centers which had restrooms with doors that open to the outside, which are more obviously park restrooms than other Community Center restrooms.  I don't know that all the Community Centers in the 2022 list have such outside-opening restrooms, though.
7. Montlake Community Center.
8. Mount Baker Park.
9. Pratt Park.  This park's restrooms were definitely under construction when I first visited the place in winter 2021-2022.  It's at least plausible that the old ones didn't have heat while the new ones do.  (It's thoroughly implausible that Cal Anderson Park's restrooms went from having heat to not having it.)
   
10. Queen Anne Bowl.
11. Riverview Playfield.
12. Seward Park Picnic Shelters.
13. South Park Community Center.
14. Volunteer Park Bandstand.

Anyway, parks in North Seattle whose restrooms' openness I didn't check in winter 2022-2023:  I didn't visit Meadowbrook Playfield or Laurelhurst Community Center at all; I didn't visit Ross Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (which Hirsch's lists call Maple Leaf Playground), Dahl Playfield, Licton Springs Park, Greenwood Park, or Sandel Playground, within the hours I'd limited myself to, before the spring openings.  Of these, Laurelhurst, Maple Leaf, Dahl and Sandel were supposed to be open, and I'm guessing the first three of those actually were open, though Maple Leaf is often closed on Sundays both in winter and at other times of year.  Ross, Meadowbrook, Licton Springs and Greenwood weren't supposed to be open, and of those, only Meadowbrook could reasonably have been opened.  (Licton Springs's restrooms, of course, have been torn down.)

I also in November called attention to Matthews Beach, which is consistently supposed to have open restrooms in winter, but I never found them so in 2020-2021.  I did find them open this time.  They're two single-stall all-gender rooms, one of which had been boarded over in 2020-2021; both were open on February 19th.

This time I only paid attention to water fountains conveniently near restrooms, but also to the street fountains.  I found four park water fountains running.  Three were attached to heated buildings - one of the golf buildings at Jackson Park, the cloverleaf restrooms of Woodland Park and the beach restrooms of Magnuson Park.  The fourth is free-standing, and I'm frankly amazed it was still running on February 19th, at Magnuson Park's central restrooms.  I don't remember what I found re street fountains - I think, one running, one not, but no idea which.

All for now, and pedants would say I've missed your birthday anyhow, but here's to a good year ahead for you, dear Diary!

Last Hike: More open restrooms, fewer running fountains

Dear Diary,

Well, today was my last hike this month for you.  I went to twelve parks.  All have water fountains, and six also have restrooms:

• Matthews Beach (both)
• Meadowbrook Playfield (both)
• Victory Heights Playground (fountain)
• Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (both)
• Licton Springs Park (both)
• Northgate Park (fountain)
• Pinehurst Playground (fountain)
• Jackson Park (both)
• Little Brook Park (both)
• Cedar Park (fountain)
• Albert Davis Park (fountain)
• Virgil Flaim Park (fountain)

I also went back to the street fountain on N 45th St.

My object was to complete the Google Drive folder in which I keep the boring door shots and such from the hikes I just finished.  I hadn't re-visited the parks from the third region I hiked earlier in May, as I had the parks from the first two, and so didn't have photos of them at Google Drive.  That is now fixed, as is my lack of a photo of that street fountain (which still isn't running).

Two major changes among those parks, plus some minor ones I'll cover below.  The first major one is that I found the restroom open at Little Brook Park, and the lock placed in such a way that it would not prevent latching the door.  I think that's the first time I've seen it like that, and expand on that a bit below.  The second major change is that while the water is still running to the water fountain at Virgil Flaim Park, some enterprising person has vandalised the fountain such that it's probably now easier to fill bottles there, but certainly harder to drink from the fountain.

I have nothing to say about some of the parks listed above, so don't say anything about them in this page, except what I just said:  there are now photos at Google Drive showing whether the restrooms were open or the water fountains running as of my last visit.

Matthews Beach

As in every one of my visits to date - none of which have taken place in calendrical summer - I found the shower restrooms on the lake side of the restroom building closed.  As in most of my visits to date, I also found one of the single-user stalls on the other side boarded up.  The remaining single-user stall has one toilet, no urinal, one sink which splashed me when I used it, but not as badly as the south-facing sink at Soundview Playfield, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.

The water fountain was not running.

Meadowbrook Community Center, Playfield and Pool

This is the sign I photographed by night on "Hike 9C", this time by day so it can be read:

The mural is signed "Miller" as is another adjacent; I don't know more.

The people staffing the pool as a shower and restroom provider have been busily posting updates:

unlike most of the Community Centers, including this one, although this one has at least taken down its sign saying it would close for the inauguration:

Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms were open, as expected (even the hopelessly outdated - well, hmmm, some things on the map offered by the Seattle Department of Human Services that I hiked last January to check, some things have been updated, for example Meridian Playground's restrooms are now mapped as open, other things haven't, such as the U-District location of the Urban Rest Stop still shown as open - but anyway, my point was, that until today that map was very out of date, but even it showed Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms as having re-opened).

Um, yeah, so the Meadowbrook Playfield men's room has two toilets with stall doors, one urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.

I found all three of Meadowbrook Playfield's water fountains this time, exactly where I'd found them before.  Two ran in October, but none are running now.

Maple Leaf Reservoir Park

The restrooms were open, and there was even an employee of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation there cleaning them.  When I update the maps tomorrow, I'll change this park's restrooms to half red, half blue.

Licton Springs Park

Unlike most of the restrooms closed in Ballard and southern "NE", but like University Playground and Little Brook, this park's restrooms have no sign on their doors announcing why they're closed.  The men's room's stuff is mostly around a bend from the door, but I could see most of the women's room - the stalls have doors, in both rooms, but one of the women's stall doors had swung open - and I saw no damage.  I've heard there's damage at University Playground but not heard a convincing explanation why that was the only restroom damage not fixed last year in North Seattle, and I've also heard a completely different reason for why those restrooms haven't opened.  I figure without even a half-assed sign like those at Ravenna Park's "upper" restrooms, there's no reason I should assume a park restroom is closed because it has to be.

Anyway.  Licton Springs's water fountains are still running.

Northgate Community Center and Park

After I visited this park as part of the third region, I complained vigourously about the way the people working for Curative Inc at a COVID testing site at the south end of the park had blocked off large parts of it.  Whether because someone at the city actually read that page (something I haven't seen signs of in months), or because someone else complained effectively, or maybe because there's an actual considerate human being among Curative's local employees, their tape is now much more carefully placed.  In particular, although it runs for some distance alongside the playground and the Community Center's front, it leaves paved paths into both areas open.  I was in a hurry, however - this was only the hike's halfway point - and took only a water fountain photo (still not running), and no photos of the tape or the Center's front, at which I didn't even look.  Sorry, dear Diary.

Pinehurst Playground

As my photo shows, the water fountain here is running rather low.  I had decided to try the water of parks whose water I hadn't tried yet, so I drained the second bottle I was carrying, but it was so hard to fill a bottle (it only got halfway, actually) that I gave up on filling two.

 

Jackson Park

I owe an apology to the Jackson Park café, which I failed miserably to describe on the basis of vague, hurried impressions on my first visit earlier this month.  (All my previous visits to this park had been too early in the morning or too late in the evening for the place to be open.)  I basically conveyed my surprise that it isn't what one normally thinks of as a "café".  Well, duh, because even though they call it that at Jackson Park, it's actually much more like a bar and grill, or at least a rather unpretentious restaurant.  It does have a few pastries, and while they're definitely not Little Debbie, they also aren't the hand-crafted wonders most actual cafés take pride in.  I got a grilled cheese sandwich to go, trying to make up for many uses of their driving range men's room, and it was pretty good blocks later.

That men's room is a single-user stall with one toilet, no urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.  Jackson Park is almost entirely devoted to a sport, so this is a fair test, and I did not see yellow spots on the toilet seat.  Score one against my argument that it's a bad idea to eliminate urinals from park restrooms.

I also looked carefully at the buildings, and Open Street Map hasn't left out a building, but it may have misplaced it.  Again, the map:

The building on the upper left could be the building by the driving range, but it can't be, because it doesn't really face the driving range, which is that big lighter green area on the top left.  It also isn't anywhere near wide enough.  I'm not sure I can learn enough to fix things like this in Open Street Map, but it needs fixed.  Anyway, though, I thought that was a building between the wide lower building and the unmapped driving range building, but there is no third building in that sequence; what I described as a "workshop" was actually a conflation in my memory of "employees only" doors in both buildings, the second of which (the one behind the part of the driving range building I'm familiar with) is rather workshoppish.

Little Brook Park

As noted above, I found the restroom not only open, but for the first time opened in such a way that the lock that closes it at night doesn't also keep users from latching it by day.

I don't know how much of this to attribute to the presence of a parks department employee, whose job it is to provide fun for people in neighbourhoods.  Someone, probably him, had set up a stereo providing music, and a portable basketball hoop, at which he was trying to teach a couple of teenagers some moves.  The parks department slogan is, I think, "Neighborhood Rec'n"; at least that's what's on their trucks.  However, a quick Google search on that turned up 0 results, so I just don't know.

Anyway, my point is, I don't know whether Little Brook's restroom has actually opened for the season or not, let alone whether its door will be reliably carefully arranged in future.

It has one toilet with no meaningful door, no urinal, one sink, one dryer, and a spot where someone had stolen one soap dispenser.

Cedar Park

Awkwardly, I found myself following a family that includes a teenaged girl for about half a dozen blocks on the way to this park.

It has a water fountain that ran last October, but isn't running now.

Albert Davis Park

This park was officially closed for one week after its May 6 sweep.  Supposedly that closure was to enable parks department employees to start restoring the park from the damage done by an encampment that was there for more than a year.  The parks department web page says nothing now about a closure, so presumably it hasn't been extended.

I visited this park twice during the closure, in prime daylight hours, and saw neither department employees nor their trucks.  Now it turns out they didn't even bother to show up to take down their closure materials.  For shame!

Virgil Flaim Park

As I walked to this park, a visibly homeless man saw the bottle in one of my satchel pockets and asked if I had any water to spare.  I didn't - for one thing, I've been drinking from that bottle for months, and for another, there were only a few sips in it - but I assured him that the water fountain in Virgil Flaim Park, just a block away, was running.  I had walked too far to hear his reply.

This park had the only outdoor water fountain known to me running in Lake City.  (I visited the Fred Meyer in the area today, and it may have a water fountain that's running, but I didn't find one.  The Lake City branch of the Seattle Public Library, and the Lake City Community Center, are both open limited hours.)  It's still running, but no longer drinkable from.

Some clever and immoral person, probably a resident of one of the neighbouring RVs, has extracted the pipe that delivers water to the spigot, and routed it so it instead delivers water toward the ground.  I think it's probably turnable enough to be a great bottle-filler, but can't be made a useable drinking spout.  I was too disgusted - this really is the kind of vandalism homeless people are endlessly accused of, plain as day really our fault this time - to experiment, and far too disgusted to try to fill my own bottle as I'd planned.

[EDIT 6/11 - All wrong.  I went back June 8, and found that the water actually comes not from this detached pipe, but from a hole in the side of another pipe, which makes it useless for filling bottles as well as for drinking directly.  I'm pretty sure this was sabotage rather than metal theft, and the main victims are probably the nearby homeless, so the saboteur was probably someone housed who objects to the existence of homeless people.  I apologise for blaming the victims.]

And from there, or anyway a few blocks from there, I caught a bus away, got a picture of the still not running N 45th St water fountain, and went on.

I still have one project to do, which I hope to accomplish next week, but we'll see.  At any rate, I hope not to hike for you next month, dear Diary.  Tomorrow, I should be able to update the spreadsheet in the Google Drive folder, and also show you final May maps of open and closed restrooms and running and otherwise water fountains.  Until then good night.

Hikes 11C and 13: Matthews Beach

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long, but this is the last page about my January hikes that I have to write.  It also covers the second hike I took housed.

Hike 11C - January 22

As I left Burke-Gilman Playground Park on January 22, the sun was already beginning to go down.  Fortunately, the Burke-Gilman Trail goes, well, not straight, but anyway directly from BGPP to Matthews Beach, so it was a straightforward trip.  All the same, I was racing against time, and ultimately lost.

I didn't even try to photograph the best face of the restroom building.  Those are "sanican"s that are there, but in this case the map I was checking also claimed the restroom was open.  True, I don't remember whether it said one restroom was open, or two were, and that matters because:

one restroom is still boarded up.  The other is not, but I was unable to open it.

I figured maybe someone was camping in it.  It was only 5:50 P.M., after all, and so far too early for a restroom to be locked for the night.  So I waited for someone from the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's maintenance department to show up to lock this one solitary restroom door in far northeastern Seattle that should need locking.

See, this building actually has two pairs of restrooms in it.  I've just shown you, dear Diary, the closed doors of the all-gender single stall restrooms, but what about the multi-user rooms that also feature showers, on the other side?  Well, those are only supposed to open in summer, like the Bathhouse Theater's in Green Lake Park, but unlike those, these don't also open in winter:

So Matthews Beach only had one room meant to be open.  Meadowbrook Playfield had none.  It was probably parks personnel staffing Meadowbrook Pool's restroom access, but probably not maintenance people.  Little Brook Park has the only restroom (singular) in Lake City, it was closed...  Basically, that restroom in Matthews Beach was the only one between Magnuson Park and Northacres Playfield that was supposed to be open.  But it's vulnerable to camping, and I found it locked.

So I stayed, growing increasingly uncomfortable, until about 7:50 P.M.  No parks personnel drove anywhere near the restroom building in that time.  I eventually had to use a "sanican" myself, and having taken off my mask while waiting, forgot to put it back on.  This led to a conversation with a fellow homeless man, a friendlier conversation than one would expect given my mistake.  But still no parks personnel.

After I gave up, I started pushing my cart, which had performed splendidly in the race despite our losing it, down Sand Point Way.  About halfway, right on schedule, the cart's right front wheel jumped off its spokes, just as I could have expected.  I didn't understand the way the back left wheel was malfunctioning, so I didn't know whether changing the wheel would fix the problem, but I did know that I'd had two good front wheels on the cart I'd thrown away about two weeks before.  Oops.  That left back wheel responded to the situation by behaving itself for an hour or so before getting back to its waywardness.

I lived on the streets of Seattle for about six years lugging everything I thought I needed around in satchels that were exposed to the rain and that I couldn't put down while it rained.  I wasn't sure I could stand to go back to that way of life, but more to the point, I needed to carry a lot more during the lockdowns than I had previously.  Sanitiser, detergent, paper towels, lots more books ...  By this point I'd already been co-operating for some time with Maia Robbins, who organised the GoFundMe that's now housed me, but this was the first time I had to face seriously the fact that I couldn't realistically continue living homeless, whether or not the GoFundMe went anywhere.  Not while COVID-19 shut everything down.

So, dear Diary, I didn't hike for you after that until I was housed.  The first hike I took then, hike 12, is the subject of another page, but I did eventually get back to Matthews Beach.

I'd had plenty of time to think about it.  I could see that a parks maintenance guy might think it made no sense to drive all that way to unlock one room, that would probably be blocked by a camper anyway, and then lock it again that night.  I could sympathise.

But that's looking at things exactly backwards.  It is not appropriate to sympathise with the idea that the less someone does, the less one should expect them to do.  Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms apparently didn't have to close.  Why, then, were they closed?  The shower restrooms at Matthews Beach are in the same building as the ones that were supposed to be open.  And they presumably have access to hot water.  So they're quite obviously winter-safe; why weren't they opened?  Reduce the options to the two all-gender single-stall rooms, and board one of those up, and it can look realistic to forget the other.  But the parks department had no reason at all, in forgetting the other, to forget a significant percentage of the city.

Hike 13 - April 3

Anyway, I went back to Matthews Beach.  I didn't arrive much earlier - 5:30 P.M. - but it was enough later in the year that the sun hadn't yet set.

I stopped along the way to take photos of the nearby bit of the Thornton Creek complex.  Since Matthews Beach is where Thornton Creek enters Lake Washington, the creek there is probably the main, unified creek, but I haven't worked on your "Land and Water" series for months, dear Diary, and am not sure.  In any event, I'd taken pictures of it months earlier and then deleted them by mistake, so although I'd written about "Chinook Passage Natural Area" May 6 in "Go North, Aging Man!" and December 1 in "To the Beaches!", I'd yet to show you, dear Diary, a photo.  Well, here are three.

In several places, gaps in the woods that weren't there last May, as best I recall, allow one to see inside the forest a fair way.  My previous attempt to capture that effect in a photo was a dismal failure, and I'm not sure this is any better, but:

Another such gap opened up a view of the creek, although I'm not at all sure my photo actually caught that:

Although it's been several years since the park got a more specific name, its sign hasn't been updated:

Anyway, I finally got back to Matthews Beach, to find the same situation as before, only sunlit.  This time I made extra sure by staying close to the restroom doors - the ones that were supposedly being unlocked and locked this winter - as much as I could, and almost always staying within sight of them.  No parks personnel had shown up by the time I left around 7:45 P.M.

I did move away from the specific door I was observing to take pictures, this time, of all the things I was supposed to on the January hikes.  The building's best face, first.  This building, like the beach one at Golden Gardens, is so extremely wide, or long, that I had to back very far up to take this shot, and I'm not sure how much of the building can actually be seen:

The restrooms that were supposed to be open:

Oh, good.  I'd hoped to show the latch in the photo just above, and it looks like that worked.

The restrooms that weren't supposed to be open, except in an alternate universe in which Seattle's government had thought about how best to serve the public, and I do mean the public - Matthews Beach isn't in an area where homeless people could plausibly live - anyway, the restrooms that weren't supposed to be open this winter, but should've been:

The unobtrusive back door to that women's room that I found for the first time that night:

When I caught them in their lies about Sandel Playground and Loyal Heights Community Center, the places where they'd shown restrooms open that were not, in fact, open, without "sanican"s, the map's makers hurried to correct those.  Of course, the lies about restrooms being open with "sanican"s present weren't really lies, by the warped thinking behind the map, because its fine print didn't actually say those rooms were open; the map wasn't corrected in this respect all winter.  But as far as I know, the map's fine print did say Matthews Beach's actual restrooms were open all winter, and as best I can tell, none were.  Sometime in the two months I was away, someone could have asked the maintenance people whether they were really driving all that way, and fixed the map.  I sent the information by e-mail, long before telling you tonight, dear Diary.  But nobody bothered.

An alternative hypothesis:  Traffic in northeastern Seattle this pandemic winter was so unusually bad that the maintenance guys had to lock Matthews Beach at 5 P.M. to get it done at all.  Um, right.  I want some of that green cheese the moon is made of, too.

The "sanican"s by day:

A sign that I photographed as I left, so I'd know how late it had been, that someone had taped over enough of that it communicated nothing at all:

Would that that map had met the same fate.

Good night, dear Diary.  Tomorrow I hope to tell you about hikes 12 and 14, both made while housed, and neither one really related to checking the map any more.  Until then.

Street Ends: Lake Washington - North

Dear Diary,

It turns out I'd remembered myself as more heroic than I actually am.  On October 20, the day I went to the Morningside Substation Site, aka Wedgwood Community Park, I did get to Matthews Beach, Magnuson Park, and the two street ends in between, but I did not also get several miles further north to the other two street ends this page discusses.  I didn't actually pull that off until the 28th.

That said, I'm circling North Seattle here, so the last shall be first.

Speaking of which.  Several of the pages I've written in you lately have ended on unhappy notes.  Arguably this page will too, but the series as a whole will not.  A sizeable share of the North Seattle street ends that aren't accessible to the public are in this very first page.  In contrast, everything I plan for the last page is wide open.

NE 135th St Street End

Photos taken October 28.

Photo 1 - The street that ends.

Photo 2 - The land area the city is claiming.

NE 130th St Street End

This small beach was introduced under this very name in "Top of the City, Part I" some time ago.  It was in the map adopted in 1993, but is no longer considered part of the street end program, possibly because it's been transferred to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Photo 1

 Photo 2

Photo 3 - The view over the water

Fair warning:  I don't think there's that much blue in the sky in any of the rest of the photos 3.

University Lake Shore Place

As long as I was up there, I thought I should photograph this pretentiously named bit of slope over the Burke-Gilman Trail.

I don't actually know that the bench is in this "park" rather than the trail.

The rest of the photos are from October 20.

NE 90th Place Street End

Photo 1

Photo 2

The city says this street end is adjacent to Matthews Beach.  If you look closely, you can see what I think is a storage area.  Assuming the resident of that house is paying the fee required for use of a street end, what that person is really paying for is not storage space but privacy.  The city has considerately left the southern end of the park nearly impassable with vegetation and streams, but someone still considered it necessary to put up a fence:

NE 85th St Street End

In several places in North Seattle, street signs are posted without actual streets to point to.  At least some of these amount to claims of street ends.

Photo 1

Well, hmmm.  I didn't actually take notes on either the 20th or the 28th, so have had to reconstruct my movements mostly from the photos' order, and only after first writing this page in you, dear Diary, did I realise that this photo probably represents the ending of the real easternmost NE 85th St, visited sort of on the way north.

Photo 2

Just keep in mind, dear Diary, that the fees presumably paid by the people using some of the street ends are what pays for the upkeep of the rest, and even this ending needn't really be unhappy.

Actually, well, I was in Matthews Beach that day, and it's a lot harder to be unhappy, I always think, around ducks.