Wallingford Playfield, Meridian Playground and a Street Fountain Today

Dear Diary,

While I remain preoccupied with things Korean, I'm also trying to get ordinary things done, and today I had to go to my bank, well south of my house.  So I decided while I was there to visit two parks near it.

This was shortly after 6 P.M., and both parks' restrooms were open.  Both parks' water fountains were running, as was the street fountain on N 45th St.  However, the latter was running so feebly that it was pretty hard to drink from.  That said, Meridian Playground's water fountain had been a poster child for water fountain neglect from the first time I visited in May 2020 until late last year, so it's a good thing that the metal thieves haven't returned to put it out of commission yet again.

The difference between fully and feebly running water fountains:

 

All the photos are at the Google Drive folders:  Meridian, Wallingford, and the street fountain.

Good night and good days until we meet again, dear Diary.

Meridian Playground Today

Dear Diary,

Yeah, I know, I told you I was done with these, but today I felt very lazy, finally convinced myself in late afternoon to go to my far-away bank for laundry quarters, and on the way back, even though I'd left my newspaper at home, I finally gave in to my curiosity:  if Gas Works Park had been swept, had Meridian Playground?

Also, I forgot to tell you, dear Diary, but I found Gas Works's water fountain running Wednesday night, the first time I've found that one running since your first page.  (Photos at Google Drive:  Meridian, Gas Works.)  So I was curious whether repair work on Meridian Playground's much more obviously damaged fountain had begun.

It has:

But:

By the standards of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, or at least its northeast maintenance team, winter has come.  So, predictably:

However, Meridian Playground has not been effectively swept.  And, well.  Meridian Playground is the former grounds of a residential school for girls (i.e., a place to throw them away).  The school building is now home to a bunch of non-profits, like other buildings such as University Heights.  However, unlike U-Heights, Good Shepherd Center is actually city-owned.  And see, dear Diary if you can figure out what's missing from this photo of their front door:

Yes, that's right, they've forgotten to put their "No Public Restrooms" sign back up!  So I'm not sure how badly off the homeless of Meridian Playground actually are tonight.

Anyway, I've been spending my lazy hours doing something I should've done months ago, building a spreadsheet of parks.  We'll see whether I finish hiking the set of downtown parks now known to me this rainy weekend, or punt and finish the spreadsheet instead, so as to go on longer hikes, to more parks, next weekend when (anything's possible) it might rain a little less.

Until whenever, then, dear Diary, good night and good days.

Few Restrooms Closed, Only One Water Fountain Running in Today's Hike

Dear Diary,

Today I visited eight parks.  I only walked through the Wallingford Steps, but in each of the others there's a water fountain or (more usually) both a fountain and restrooms, and I took pictures of these with today's newspaper in each one.

I'm not going to spend the rest of the night uploading those pictures to Blogspot.  I've just uploaded them all to my Google Drive account, and it appears that the following link enables anyone who wishes to see those photos to see them.

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

Aside from not boring you and anyone who reads you with endless door shots, this has the great advantage that the date and time information that is the bulk of each photo's meta-information is preserved intact.  On top of which, each photo has tonight as its last-modified date, and each photo has today's newspaper in it.  I finally have redundantly dated photos for you, dear Diary, only I can't show them to you directly in your pages to accomplish that.  Sorry!

Anyway, then, as of this afternoon and early evening, here's a summary of the results by function:

Water fountain running at Sunset Place, which is in Northwest.  All the other parks I got to are in North, and no water fountain known to me was running in any of those.  They are:  Meridian Playground, Wallingford Playfield, Gas Works Park, B. F. Day Playground, Woodland Park and Green Lake Park.

Restrooms closed at Woodland Park (Citywide Athletics Building, which the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation nicknames "Rio") and at Green Lake Park (Community Center, women's room only).  Both closures had explanations posted, and were not simply the result of negligence.  All the other restrooms I visited were open, including ones in Meridian Playground, Wallingford Playfield, Gas Works Park, Woodland Park and Green Lake Park.

Results by park:

Meridian Playground - restrooms open (as usual, except that they close in winter), water fountain hopelessly damaged in a way that suggests metal thievery, as it has been since I first saw it last year.  I also decided to take notes on men's rooms on this series of hikes, and the men's room at Meridian has one toilet, one urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.  I tried at least one sink for each men's room this kind of note is attached to, found it not of the kind that mostly sprays users' clothes, and found any dryer mentioned working.

Street fountain on N 45th St near Wallingford Ave N - still not running, as it has been since late March; before that, as far as I knew, it ran throughout the pandemic, incuding winter.  I took a picture, but either it didn't actually get taken, or I deleted it accidentally from my phone.  (My phone's camera has recently eliminated a feature that helped me know whether it really took a picture, so I periodically have to go through deleting duplicate and triplicate photos.)  When I take another photo of it, there'll be a folder at Google Drive for that photo.

Wallingford Playfield - restrooms open (as usual), water fountain recently repaired but still not running; last year it was hopelessly damaged.  The men's room at Wallingford has the same things as the one at Meridian.  I did not note, this time, at either of these parks, whether the toilet stalls had doors.

Gas Works Park - restrooms open (they're officially open 24 hours at least during the pandemic), water fountain not running; it still shows no sign of damage, but hasn't, as far as I know, run since the pandemic began.  The men's room has two toilets without stall doors, one urinal, one sink, and one soap dispenser.

B. F. Day Playground - water fountain not running.  It gave a trickle last spring and was running last autumn.

Sunset Place - water fountain running.  It ran both last spring and last autumn.

Woodland Park - By region:

• Northwest - There's a single water fountain near the entrance to the park at Phinney Ave N and N 59th St.  It's too damaged to use, as it has been since I found it last autumn, but the style of the damage suggests that it may have been disabled by parks staff rather than by metal thieves.
• Lawn bowling - A restroom building is right next to one of the lawn bowling greens near the park entrance at Aurora Ave N and West Green Lake Way N; its restrooms were limitedly open in winter, but last year were unpredictably 24 hours.  The men's room has two toilets without stall doors, one urinal, one sink, no dryer, and one soap dispenser.  One water fountain is under its eaves, within the usually locked bowling green; it wasn't running last autumn.  Another is some distance away, near shelter 6; it ran last autumn, but isn't running now.  Neither looks damaged.
  
• Pink Palace - Some way south of the lawn bowling restrooms this quite pink building is at the top of a hill.  It has two water fountains attached to it which haven't run since the pandemic began and still don't; they don't look damaged.  The restrooms have been open most nights I've been near them since the pandemic began.  The men's room has two toilet stalls with doors, one urinal, two sinks, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.
  
• 50th - Northwest of Woodland Park Ave N and N 50th St there's a restroom building which has been open 24 hours somewhat less reliably than the Pink Palace.  The men's room has two toilets without stall doors, one urinal, two sinks, one dryer, and would have a soap dispenser except that someone has stolen it.  Right out front of the men's room is a really old-fashioned water fountain which hasn't run since the pandemic began, but has been disabled since at least last autumn in a way reminiscent of the northwest fountain.  The same is true of a water fountain directly north of Woodland Park Ave N, which is of the same make as the northwest fountain and disabled in the same ways.
• Citywide Athletics Building (again, "Rio") - Two water fountains are on either side of the home plate of the big baseball diamond at the park's southeast corner.  They have both been hopelessly disabled, probably by metal thieves and maybe by the same bunch as at Meridian Playground, since the pandemic began.  North of the baseball diamond is the Citywide Athletics Building.  It has restrooms that open to the outside, and are normally open in winter, but since January have been posted as closed due to vandalism, which forced the parks department to do some juggling.
• Cloverleaf - With the big baseball diamond as field #1, the four Leo Lassen Fields are #3-#6, vaguely resembling a four-leafed clover.  A building with the address 5427 East Green Lake Way N in the middle of the cloverleaf holds two restrooms with doors that open to the outside.  These normally close in winter, but this winter were open with limited hours.  They were open today.  The water fountain attached to the building gave a trickle last May, and ran last October - that's only two in the park, the other being near shelter 6 - but isn't running now.  A girls' game was going on, resulting in a real crowd near this building, so I didn't take notes on the men's room, and thereafter stopped partly from forgetting, partly from rain.
  

Green Lake Park - By region; all restrooms can be open all year:

• Small Craft Center (nicknamed "Shellhouse" by the parks department), near the southern end of the lake.  Most of last year, I think these restrooms were open 24 hours, but the people who work there were unhappy with the results, and as of winter, it closes, though later than most park restrooms.  Two water fountains attached to two buildings ran last year (in spring as well as fall), but haven't been started yet this year.
• 64th St (nicknamed "65th St" by the parks department).  These restrooms were usually open 24 hours last year, and are now the designated 24 hour restrooms of this park.  I've never found a water fountain near them.  On the way there I saw geese escorting their goslings:
  
  
  
• Community Center.  The Green Lake Community Center and Evans Pool have been undergoing inscrutable construction work that got a lot more scrutable sometime between January and now with the erection of a sign that explains that they're doing "stabilization" work now, with the hope to buy time until mid-decade, to allow a more thorough planning of the replacement.
  
  The restrooms have been unpredictably open, but in recent visits ("Hikes 12 and 14" and today) the men's room has been open but not the women's.  Today the men's room had both warm and cold water, but it's a good idea to make sure it at least has cold running water before using it.  The water fountain trailward of the building ran last fall, but doesn't run now.
  
• Wading pool, at the north end of the park.  These restrooms have usually been the official 24 hour restrooms of the park, and are still usually open 24 hours.  Two water fountains attached to the building ran last fall, but not now; I didn't find the free-standing double fountain not far away then, so haven't observed it running.
• Theatre, the building known as the Bathhouse or Bath House Theater, the company inside it the Seattle Public Theater (parks department nickname "Bath House" or "Bathhouse").   I didn't find these restrooms open last May or October; they're supposed to open in summer for the theatre season, and by different people expected to open in winter too.  I first found them open in January and had to eat some crow about it; they're open now too, which they definitely oughtn't normally be.  So much as I complain about the parks department ignoring the pandemic in their decision-making, this is a notable exception.  Anyway, there's a free-standing double fountain in front of the men's room, and two fountains attached in back of the women's room; I'm pretty sure all ran last October, but none run now.

And since I got that far only after 7 P.M. (closing times for the Bathhouse, Community Center and Shellhouse restrooms seem to be between 8 and 9 P.M.), it was too late to go on to the parks of Greenwood, so that's as far as I got in "N" today.

More about the hikes I'm now trying to plan tomorrow, dear Diary; it's been quiet time for a quarter hour again.  Good night.

Another Hike in Wallingford

Dear Diary,

Apparently my using the lyrics to a song for May Day confused people, so I'll try to provide clearer titles.  This page's predecessor is "While Strolling in the Parks One Day", part I.

I've hiked to lists of parks in North Seattle three times before, in May and June 2020, in October, and in January.  In the May and June hikes I was primarily trying to find out how unusual the weird situation I was in locally was:  several restrooms closed all the time, others randomly; two water fountains running, the rest stopped.  What I found was that my then area had almost a monopoly on closed restrooms, but also had two of very few water fountains running in North Seattle.  By October most of the local water fountains had been turned back on; my main concern was to find out how general that was (extremely hit-and-miss, it turned out), but I also looked at rentable and other picnic shelters.  In January I was mostly checking a map of restrooms and "sanican"s purportedly available to the homeless, not all in parks, but also tried many water fountains.

The list of places I went changed each time.  In May and June I went to every park I knew about from the parks department website, and also surveyed the Ballard seacoast with some care.  By October I had found the city of Seattle's 2020 real property report (PDF), and had added a bunch of parks, but also removed a bunch of others that didn't have restrooms or fountains; I also went to available lists of waterways (PDF map and much longer PDF document) and shoreline street ends.  In January I went to far fewer places, but had had a lot longer to study the 2020 report, and also added some non-park places to visit.  My theoretical goal in all this was to establish whether each additional place I went offered either restrooms or water fountains (few did), but all the changes also kept the hikes more interesting to do, whether or not they made my writing more interesting, and allowed me to visit a lot of neat places.

Well, this time it looks probable that there's another water fountain drought, but I don't know yet, so it's back to hiking.  Because I'm now housed, it's more practical for me to make shorter hikes instead of the epic multi-day journeys that accomplished most of the work in the previous rounds.  Because I'm now writing with a laptop, it's easier to keep up with photos, so I'm photographing parks I haven't photographed before, hence re-visiting all the parks (but not, in particular, all the waterways and street ends, of most of which I've shown you, dear Diary, photographs in the past), with the excuse that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation might have installed a water fountain in any park over the year since I last visited many of them.  (Although it very probably hasn't.)

But working with the 2021 real property report has sent me back to the 2020 one.  In January I'd made a list of interesting-looking places from it - vacant lots, major landmarks, places designated "parks" by the Department of Transportation but not by the parks department - but it was January, I was still homeless, and I didn't do anything with that list.  Yesterday I went back through the 2020 report, listing everything I hadn't already that was in North Seattle; it was a shorter list.  I also divvied the parks, P-Patches, and other sites into eleven broad areas.  And today I walked, again, one of those areas, everything between 1st Ave NW and I-5, and between N 50th St and the Ship Canal:  in other words, a reasonable approximation of Fremont and Wallingford.

I've already told you, dear Diary, about my return to the parks of those areas in three pages last Saturday (plus a fourth that tackled Woodland Park, to which I didn't return today).  Today I went back to a few of those parks, finding no changes re restrooms and water fountains, but also went to every other site on my new list.  And this page, and three more to come tonight, are mostly to tell you about those places.  I've picked places to tell you about on several grounds:

• Whether they were, pre-COVID-19, open to the public.
• Whether they're easily seen by the public.
• Whether they offer, or pre-COVID offered, restrooms and/or water fountains to the public.
• How park-like they are.
• How photogenic they are.

In other words, I'm not interested in making it possible for evildoers to destroy our infrastructure by reading you, nor am I going to bore you with all the many puzzling lines in the real property report, dear Diary, but I am interested in turning, especially, P-Patches and public-facing sites for Seattle Public Utilities, from occasional discoveries into things that your pages provide guidance to.

(I'm not broadening this to school district, port, county, state, or federal real property lists, if each of those actually offer them to the public.  So in particular, I'm not, this time, visiting schools and post offices.)

So let's get started.  I'm interpreting Wallingford as the neighbourhood from Stone Way N to I-5 and from the Ship Canal to 50th, but this page doesn't actually cover any of the stuff near the Ship Canal.  I start as before at a large block that includes Meridian Playground, but not quite the same place.

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

Good Shepherd Center

I mentioned this building in the page in which I originally introduced Meridian Playground to you, dear Diary, "A Shower at Green Lake", as originally a home for orphaned and "wayward" girls.  The latter strongly suggests that it was also a sort of prison, and I speculated that their ghosts might haunt the shrouded apple trees in the park.

The Good Shepherd Center is easiest to reach from the east side of the block in which it sits, as the park is from the west or south.  Here's a sign:

 

Here's the building.  The real estate report's listing for Good Shepherd Center makes it out to be immense, over four acres, and I don't know how much of that is the quite large building:

how much the grounds, statelier than the park or Seattle parks in general:

Good Shepherd Center is one of several big old buildings that have been turned into homes for non-profit organisations in North Seattle, and I would assume citywide, but others, such as the University Heights building near where I used to live, aren't in the real property report; this one is.  It appears normally to be open to the public, and has no such sign as U-Heights puts up advertising "No Public Restrooms"; instead there's this:

Those are better hours, weekdays, than the park's restrooms offer.  But of course that's not the current status:

Oh, well.  My assumption is that this'll be the norm, because any place currently allowing the public inside should've been on the map I checked in January.

Anyway...

Good Shepherd P-Patch

In general, I won't have much to say about the P-Patch community gardens, of which many hikes and all my eleven regions include examples.  They all have access to water, and as far as I know all control that water with keys provided to the gardeners.  But they're kind of parkish, they post their own rules for visitors, which obviously means they can and expect to be visited, and as I said, one of my purposes in these hikes is to get clear on the P-Patches.  This one occupies much of the south of the big block.  A photo:

As I left, I confirmed that Meridian Playground's restrooms were open, its water fountain still hopelessly un-useable.

The Wallingford Street Fountain

Each of the "another" pages I'm writing in you tonight, dear Diary, includes one of the three places I had to go back to.  Much of the reason I tried to visit all these other places is just to keep that trip from being a boring slog of hiking to these three rather widely separated places.

Anyway, this is one of the three.  It was the last street fountain known to me to be running, as recently as March (and near as I can tell, it ran most of the winter, hah), but in what appears to me now to be the mayor's latest campaign against water addiction (i.e., against human beings), it isn't running now:

The Seattle Public Library, Wallingford branch

This appears to be in a newer building which was built for civic use, but isn't city-owned.  As a result, the 2021 report, which omits a bunch of parks that aren't city-owned, also omits this library; that kind of thing is the main reason I worked yesterday from the 2020 report.  A view of the library:

The closed doors:

The rest of the building's also-closed doors:

After this, I headed way east and south, verifying on the way that Wallingford Playfield's restrooms were open, its water fountain still not running.  Last time I worried a little that there might be parks in "NE" but west of I-5 that I'd omitted.  There are no parks with such addresses south of 50th St, but there are five other city sites, all near but not on the water.  The next page is about some of those.  Until then, dear Diary.

While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part I

Dear Diary,

Ooh, it's just like old times!  I went on a long hike today, and now begin to tell you all about it just as if I were always so prompt.

I decided that since I've yet to start anything in "N" - that is, between "NE" and "NW" - it was time to do so.  Especially since I had errands today on N 45th St and N 36th St, to run along the way.

While I've been working on behind the scenes stuff, dear Diary, I've been re-reading you, and it's been frustrating watching myself keep making rules against taking photos.  So I set off on this hike with the attitude that I must visit each park in my target area, and must take at least one photo at each.  I didn't go so far as to consult the 2021 Seattle real property report, which I just found out has already been released to the public, and which provides the most authoritative list of parks in town, though I'll probably do that before my next long hike.  But anyway I meant to go back to all the parks I already knew about.

This page, and part II tonight, are for the parks from the north side of N 50th St to the Ship Canal, in Wallingford, here defined as lying between Stone Way N and 1st Ave NE.  I do think Wallingford reaches further east than that, but it was much easier to assemble the list of parks without having to check each NE address.  As things are, I'll have to write a part III tomorrow, because I forgot one park and one street water fountain that I did know about.  But here are the ones I didn't forget.

First, however, something of an executive summary:  As of today, several weeks after the weather warmed up, no park water fountain between N 50th St and the Ship Canal was running.  The fountain at B. F. Day Playground, the only one running last October, is not running now.  I didn't test every fountain in Woodland Park, which has several trillion of them, but did try half a dozen, including the only two that ran last October, and none of them ran either.

Between this and other reporting, it looks like our mayor really is waging war against water addiction, as I satirically suggested last year, and it might be summer again before bottles of water stop functioning as currency among the homeless.  Or maybe it'll be that way until all lockdowns end, or at least the mayor's office changes hands.

In the meantime, as we're about to see, the map I made the January hikes to check is now actually out of date as to park offerings for hygiene for this area:

- yes, that's right, the map which lied all winter about restrooms being open that weren't is now omitting restrooms that really are open - but, anyway, the map knows of no other places, charities, libraries, whatever, where people can get water in the region I walked today.

EDIT 5/11:  I figured out today how to insert maps from the Open Street Map project, and may have figured out how to edit them, though not, as yet, how to edit them with precision.  The two maps that follow are an overview of the region, and a map of the area covered in this page specifically, but don't take the inserted letters and numbers in the second map as exact guidance.

Meridian Playground

I've told you and shown you quite a lot about this park already, dear Diary, including my first two videos, because I like it a lot.  I summarised all that January 3 in "Hike 1A:  Inconvenients", and hadn't been back until today.  (Though I did reflect on its hugeness for a "playground" January 6 in "What's in a Name?")  Anyway, knowing this was one park I hadn't stinted, I didn't photograph but the bare minimum this time.  The restrooms were open:

The men's room photo is tilted so as to get the sign, but avoid a man who was lying on his sleeping bag under it.

The water fountain remains in an advanced state of decay:

Yes, that's grass visible through what should be the drain.

The shelter remains inhabited, and having recently pointed out that the campers in Woodland Park seem less secure than they were, I should mention something else that I don't think I've shared with you yet, dear Diary:

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation is not accepting reservations for several park shelters, mostly in North Seattle, to wit Gas Works, Ravenna and Woodland Parks, and Meridian Playground.  All but Ravenna Park's shelter were inhabited or in closely related use by homeless people when I surveyed the shelters in my October hikes, and to the best of my recollection also during the January hikes, though those focused less on the shelters.

En route

A block south of the park border on Bagley Ave N stands a "sanican".  It isn't near any visible construction site, so I was curious whether it was a defensive measure put up by neighbours, in which case it would be unlocked, or near a non-visible construction site, in which case it would be locked.  Neither case quite applied:

Not far from there, I found an early work of someone who is obviously a park planner in the making:

Oh, dear, it looks like the sign isn't readable.  It read something like "Please enjoy the dinosaur garden.  Please don't touch."  I was impressed.  Most non-green bits of colour in the photo are toy dinosaurs.

Corliss Place

As previously reported June 8 in "A Shower at Green Lake", this is a traffic triangle.  As previously reported January 6 in "What's in a Name?", it would take a more dedicated park-lover than me to find something nice to say about this park, but anyway here, at long last, is a photo:

Wallingford Playfield

The references for this park are the same, but I've been much less enthusiastic about it, and only started paying my arrears in January.  So I took the same photos as at Meridian Playground, but also the only landscape angle I could find that wasn't full of people:

Unfortunately, the others really are the same photos.  In January, I noticed that the water fountain had been fixed, and allowed myself to hope that there would be park water in Wallingford this year.  Not yet:

At least the restrooms are open:

The Wallingford Steps

I went through Seattle's 2020 real property report more or less line by line last January, and listed everything in North Seattle I thought might prove more or less parklike.  I found seven places particularly interesting:  they're areas owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation, which classifies them as parks.  The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation only classifies two of these as parks in its own list, in other words maintains web pages on those two but not the rest.  The Wallingford Steps and Peace Park are those two, and the Wallingford Steps is the only one of the seven in today's target area.

Three parks in Wallingford and Fremont are organised around big height differentials within them.  This is the most determinedly non-ADA, and the fanciest.  I've previously, June 9 in "At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?", shown you, dear Diary, a picture of these steps' central landing/mosaic, but I haven't tried to show that to you in context, illustrate why the parks department might accept this as a park.  Here's a try:

And that's where this page had better stop, dear Diary, because I have a bunch of photos of the next few parks, and Blogspot gets cranky if I use too many in one page.  Until a little later.

What's in a Name?

Dear Diary,

Going Sunday to visit some of the more prominent parks of northeast Seattle reminded me of something I'd more or less forgotten:  my imagining a hierarchy of park naming.

I don't know of a North Seattle Parks and Recreation park that goes by only one name, like Madonna.  They're all two or more, a specific name and a more general, vaguely classifying, one.

I spent some sleepless time two nights ago classifying the parks in my list by their second names.  Last night I added their "amenities" as listed by the department on their web pages, and today (um, the 5th) their areas in acres.

I wasn't surprised that "Park" was the clear champion, 46 not counting one "Mini Park" and two "Pocket Park"s.  The runners up are all clustered in a group, "Natural Area", "Place", "Playfield", and "Playground", ten to twelve each.

My imagined hierarchy is Park sometimes > Playfield > Playground > Place.  So let's take "Natural Area" first.  Weirdly, the department reserves this, in North Seattle, for Thornton Creek and its tributaries, ten of the eleven.  The only exception is Pipers Creek Natural Area.  Which is a reminder that parks' names are partly political.  In this case, Pipers Creek is sometimes set up as a northwestern equivalent to Thornton Creek.

Parks about other streams need other names.  Thornton Creek grabs some of these too - Inverness Ravine Park, Victory Creek Park, Mock Creek Ravine.  But a park near the surviving mouth of Yesler Creek is Union Bay Boglands, then there's Ravenna Ravine (actually an unnamed tributary to Ravenna Creek) and no fewer than four parks in northwestern Seattle on four different creeks - Crown Hill Glen, North Beach Ravine, North Beach Park and Llandover Woods Greenspace.

This is counting only parks that, well, feel like Natural Areas.  Victory Creek Park recently had picnic tables and a playground, but today its main concession to the lazy is a single bench.  It wasn't clear how to allocate other parks.  In Little Brook and Ravenna Parks, the titular streams can be seen, but is that fair to Victory Heights Playground, whose stream has vanished?

Anyway.  The hierarchy.

"Place"s really stand out.  They're small, and they have few or no symbolised amenities.  Belvoir Place in turn looks different on both counts - at .42 acres it's by far the biggest, and it has two amenities listed, a waterway for hand-carried boats and a view.  The rest are all below .25 acres, and only two have even one amenity listed - Bergen Place's art (yuck) and Sunset Place's water fountain.  The views from Sunset Place and the Blue Ridge Places, all of which I've shown you, dear Diary, are not listed, so that's a reminder that the lists of amenities aren't infallible.

Size isn't a reliable guide to these classifications either, except when it is.  No "playfield" or "playground" in North Seattle is below a quarter acre.  Most "place"s are, also all three "circle"s (all of which really are more or less traffic circles), both "pocket park"s and the "mini park", and both "triangle"s and the "square" that's really a triangle.

But that leaves ten other very small parks.  I won't list all of them, but half have all sorts of names, including Marvin's Garden and the Wallingford Steps, and half are "park"s, including Peace Park and Thyme Patch Park.  Most of the "place"s don't matter much to me, but the kids of one neighbourhood would really miss Wedgwood Square, the students of another Christie Park, and I'd be sorry never to have seen Pinehurst Pocket Park.

All the parks I failed to find - one of the Blue Ridge Places, Cascade Place and Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area - are under a quarter-acre.  Good to know there are limits to my visual difficulties.

Anyway, moving on.  All "playground"s in North Seattle are rather bigger.  Most are between 2 and 4 acres; Meridian is twice 4, though, and Pinehurst and Victory Heights a little less than 2.  All but one have playgrounds; the exception, Sacajawea Playground, has the playground of Sacajawea Elementary School next door listed as an amenity to conform it.  All except Froula and Sacajawea have water fountains; nearly half have restrooms (although those at Ross aren't listed among its amenities).

Which brings me to southern Ballard.  I found "Ross Playground", as listed at the parks department website, billing itself as "Ross Playfield" on its scoreboard, "Ross Park" on its main sign.  I was sold.  I'll note that its list of amenities, once bolstered not only by its restrooms but also by the art (the mosaic) I keep having trouble photographing, is more than adequate to a park its size.

"Gilman Playground" is more problematic.  On first seeing it, primed by the instability of Ross's name, I thought "This is obviously a playfield."  I meant its focus on sports - it lists the most sports as amenities, baseball, basketball, soccer and tennis, among North Seattle's playgrounds - and the sheer blandness I find in all playfields.  At the time I conceived this conspiracy theory:  "Ballard residents won't let Ross and Gilman move up to their rightful places in the hierarchy because Ballard Playground is only a playground."  More seriously, Gilman as a playfield would be the smallest, just under 4 acres, except for the parks that are playfields by virtue of being high schools' playfields (Ingraham and Nathan Hale).

As for Meridian Playground, in hierarchy terms it can't move up because it has no sports except a minimal concession to basketball, but it's easily as rich an experience as many official parks.  I dunno.  I don't live near any of these three, and I don't know the real politics of their names.  It seems obvious that people have recurringly been unsatisfied to call Ross a "playground", but beyond that?

It's obviously time to move on.  "Playfield"s are, as suggested above, bigger, except for Ingraham Playfield (.8 acres) and presumably Nathan Hale Playfield (whose area I don't know).  (In fact, let's please leave these two, which don't have parks department web pages, out of all the rest of this.)  Wallingford is the smallest of the rest in North Seattle, at 4 1/2 acres; Loyal Heights, 6 2/3, is next.  Meadowbrook, 18 1/2, is the biggest.  All have restrooms and water fountains, although Dahl's fountain isn't listed among its amenities, and some of the restrooms are technically in community centers (which are, in turn, in the playfields).

They all offer multiple sports, though at least in their web pages' lists of amenities, arguably none exceed Gilman's four.  (Depends on the definition of "sport".)  All list baseball except Wallingford.  I'd thought "playfield" status demanded baseball diamonds, so I did some digging.  At a community website, in the 23rd comment, by "gregf", beginning "Since the field area was created in 1970", is a historical take on Wallingford Playfield's field, and how the parks department has apparently pushed to turn it more specific (probably for baseball).  Let's hear it for the bland!

So maybe it's obvious by now that this page is really more about memories than about names, and why do the playfields give me so few meaningful memories?  Obviously, I didn't play sports in them growing up, nor since.  I did play Little League as a child, and think I must have had fun, but don't in the least associate that with the Milwaukee parks involved.  I remember ultimate frisbee in college much more vividly, but nobody needs a specially marked space for ultimate; we used the Midway, which is in fact a Chicago park, but of which I have many more memories than just sporting ones.

North Seattle's playfields, as I've mentioned more than once to you, dear Diary, try to show individuality in their playgrounds, ironic in terms of the notional hierarchy by which playfields should care more about other things.  Soundview is so much the winner in this as to shade all the rest, and although I've offered photos of Wallingford's, Meadowbrook's and Laurelhurst's playgrounds in my desperate search for "neat stuff" at each, surely, dear Diary, you remember the joy with which I greeted Laurelhurst's firepit and bridge, and the creeks at Dahl and Meadowbrook, as actual differences?  I suppose my brief enthusiasms for those creeks foreshadowed "Land and Water".

What is clear is that I haven't really been fair to parks' sporting aspects, and to whatever extent I write about parks after you, dear Diary, I ought to try to do better.  I suppose at least leaving team sports out of you enhances your credibility as a record of the pandemic, though.

When I think about it, this ignoring goes beyond the playfields.  I've repeatedly told you, dear Diary, about the bowl in Ravenna Park that's even lower than the "lower" restrooms, about its purple paving stone, concerts in it, and its outlet from the park's ravine, but I've never mentioned, have I, that it's actually a baseball diamond?  I seem to have mentioned actual sporting contests - soccer at Cal Anderson Park, tennis at Laurelhurst, softball at Ravenna - primarily as opportunities to ogle players.  Sheesh.

Anyway, as this implies, some North Seattle "park"s can be seen as improved playfields, lending support to my idea of a hierarchy.  Some big parks do this on steroids; Magnuson Park, the biggest, lists sixteen amenities, including baseball, soccer and tennis.  But some don't:  Carkeek Park lists only hiking, if one considers that a sport.  Only seven of the 46 list baseball (Cowen, Green Lake, Magnuson, Maple Leaf, Northacres, Ravenna, Woodland).

So really, this hierarchy is looking pretty shaky by now.  I thought the less sporting "park"s won that title by strong individuality - places like Fremont Canal and Fremont Peak, or Peace, or Ballard Corners.  But then what do we do about the recipe for a Seattle park I concocted after first seeing Cedar and Little Brook:  "Take a playground, add a grassy area, and there you are."

"Park" isn't just the "Smith" of parks.  It's more common, and it more often really points to an actual smith.  That is, of the 46, quite a few either have lots of amenities, or strong individuality.  But "park" is also the "Smith" of parks.  And politically, it's the obvious way to keep up with the Joneses.  I'm sure several of the "park"s made by my recipe got that title because the park in the next neighbourhood already had it.

So I think "place", "playground", and "playfield" are real categories with real definitions.  I don't know whether, elsewhere in Seattle, "natural area" is such a category; here it's been captured by Thornton Creek.  "Park" is not such a category.

What about the little categories?

There are more "boulevard"s not just in Seattle, but in the parks department's list of parks, than Ravenna.  There are more "garden"s than Marvin's, though I suspect they all mean the word more vegetatively.  There are more "mini park"s than Lake City, more "plaza"s than University Heights, more "viewpoint"s than NW 60th St; there is even one more "greenspace" than Llandover Woods.

Burke-Gilman is of course not the only "trail" in Seattle, but for some reason it's the only one listed as a Seattle park on the department website.  Similar for "boglands" and Union Bay, "glen" and Crown Hill, "homestead" and Hubbard, "loop" and Cheshiahud Lake Union, "open space" and Bitter Lake Reservoir, and "steps" and Wallingford.

Out of many, many.  I started you, dear Diary, with a warning about lying to you, but there's a sense in which I've been lying to you all along.  I am not in fact the biggest fan of our current mayor.  I adopted that pose as a satirical device, which maybe makes the lying OK, but it became harder and harder to maintain the more I wrote about Cal Anderson Park.

So take this business of closing the big parks entirely on holidays, and early at other times, with the exhortation that Seattle has hundreds of other parks.  From a public health standpoint this is dubious.  The big parks offer more room for social distancing than the small, but they also offer more room for crowds and superspreader events.

But although my father was an epidemiologist, I am not; I write, at the moment, about parks.  And the mayor's advice was more right than wrong.  As this epidemic drags on, Seattle does have many outdoor places worth visiting.  Yes, it takes more love for parks than I can muster to find something special about Corliss Place, but that's more the exception than the rule.  I've mentioned a lot of interesting parks in this page, and in your pages in general, dear Diary, and I hope, if it ever stops raining, that anyone who reads you will explore some of them.  Good night.

Hike 1A: Inconvenients, part I

Dear Diary,

I just couldn't help myself, today I had to get out there and start hiking even before the rain stopped.  I didn't get as far as I wanted, but did complete more than half.  Here's the first half of the first half.

My actual goal for this hike was to get to Northgate.  One reason I've been so scared of rain lately is that on my hike of December 28, I tore a hole in the larger of my umbrellas.  The fear of rain was becoming a real problem, so I needed to do the simplest thing I could to assuage it, replace that umbrella.  The Target near me had no room for such big ones, hence Northgate, where I'd bought the original in October.

But I'd been meaning to start with a different hike, and specifically with Maple Leaf Reservoir Park.  Well, but Maple Leaf is on the way to Northgate ...  And just like that a hike became clear, linking a bunch of places that weren't at all convenient to do in the day journies I've been planning.  A leftovers hike.

I'd also decided I really should at least take a look at everything on the HSD map.  So my first stop was hardly a park.

45th St NE at I-5

The city has a full set of "sanican"s here for a nearby encampment.  (Well, the map staunchly maintains that anyone can use them, and is no doubt correct, but I think it's clear where most of the business must come from.)

So HSD listed a regular "sanican", an ADA one, and a hand-washing station.  All present:

I remembered that in the original article that pretty much inspired you, dear Diary, Erica C. Barnett had actually looked inside the "sanican"s.  So now that I was actually going to pay attention to them, despite my continued belief that running water is the ideal, how could I do less?

Probably fortunately for everyone's sanity, either my rain-wet fingers failed to get photos taken, or the camera erased them, but both sanitiser dispensers there lacked casings and bottles of sanitiser.  Both units had plenty of toilet paper.

Wallingford Playfield

This park has never really gotten its deserved attention from me.  I introduced it June 9 in "At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?"  But by that point in the relevant day's hiking, I was just too tired to take in another park, especially a playfield.  I had another chance October 8 in "South of North Once More, Part I".  But I couldn't take any photos, there were so many people there, so I even forgot the restrooms' conditions, one of the things the October hikes focused on.  I did at least notice that big rocks seemed to figure prominently in the park's design.

Do tell.

That's from the opposite corner of the park from where I've previously been.

Another example - the greenery is nice, yes, but look behind it:

Well, darn, that didn't work right at all.  One of the rocks behind the trees is visible, but not at all the actual stone wall behind them.

Anyway.  I didn't want the restroom buildings to think I was neglecting them for "sanican"s, so I decided that if I was going to photograph the "sanican"s, I should photograph the buildings too, not just their open or closed doors.  Voila:

This building has the magical property that when it rains, none of its awnings can keep any side dry.

I also, of course, found rocks in the one place playfields reliably try for individuality, the playgrounds:

The water fountain visible at that photo's far right seems to have been fixed, so perhaps Wallingford will have a working park water fountain later this year.

Anyway, HSD, Parks and last year's list all agreed this one should be open, and so it is.  Huzzah!

Meridian Playground

Unlike its neighbour to the south, I've showered this quirky park with attention; I really like it, but will just refer anyone interested to "A Shower at Green Lake" June 8, "South of North Once More" I again, and "Standing Room Only, Part III:  Less Near UW" November 23.  On this visit I was all business.  Only Parks expected this one to be open, but majority ruled.

The shot of the closed women's room door is odd because a woman was actually camping in the sheltered doorway.

University Playground

I've treated this as, well, a neglected stepchild among my core parks all along; see in particular "Our Main Characters" April 25, "We're All in This Together" April 28, "The Curious Incident of the Light in the Night-Time" May 2, "Foolish Mortal" May 6, "Home Dry Home" June 4 and, um, "Water Fountains - An Interim Report Part III" October 3.  This is the only park with restrooms in North Seattle, none of whose restrooms were open at any time in 2020, and I haven't treated it much better.

Not today, either, but to foil my nefarious plan to leave it out of a future University District hike, a tall man stood the entire time I was there in the doorway of the men's room, so I couldn't take all three shots.

University Playground has also historically had a "sanican".  Reliably, once a year it would get trashed, and the next one would be from a different company.  I always figured a neighbourhood group had put it there, and had too little power with the vendors to get them to swallow the destruction.  But no, it's the city's, and even their lavish spending on Honey Bucket couldn't keep the company here.  The company that is here, though, has now been for some time; either they're very tolerant, or the trasher graduated, got caught, or left town.  HSD's map includes this; I have no idea why, but the Parks map does not.

This is the only "sanican" I found today out of toilet paper.

The white doohickey in that photo is at an angle that announces:  "There's no sanitiser bottle here to stop me, ha ha!"  Remember that angle.

Seattle Public Library - University Branch

Sorry, dear Diary.  I know I've told you about the restrooms here before, more than once, and with at least one photo, but when I was indexing you it didn't even occur to me to list those references.

Anyway.  For big buildings, I figured the equivalent of photographing the best side of a restroom building is to take the money shot, the one they want to sell postcards of, such as:

Well, OK, they don't want to sell postcards of my version, but...  Anyway, here's the open door:

Granted, all that tape looks hostile; clearly they've decided everyone should use the ramp.  But they were open, as scheduled and as HSD claims.

So far HSD has a perfect score, while Parks was wrong about Meridian and University Playgrounds.  I have to confess, dear Diary:  I wrote to the media people for both departments, Parks and HSD, tonight, about things I'd noticed wrong with their maps, even before telling you.  I hope you aren't too angry.

But Blogspot has been fighting every photograph I've uploaded in this page, dear Diary.  And I took a lot of photos at Northgate.  So I'm glad the site seems to have let me keep together the places that in fact are closer together, but I'm going to have to put Maple Leaf and Northgate into a separate page.  Also to put that page off until tomorrow.  Even if that gives HSD, at least, who seem to have been maintaining their map, a chance to hide their mistakes.

Good night, dear Diary.