The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VIIC: Northeast (eastern group)

Dear Diary,

Wow, it's good to be done hiking downtown to appreciate parks.  I still have to hike downtown for two other reasons - artist credits and some carelessness about water fountains in some of my earlier hikes, plus the changing seasons affecting those.  But I don't have to wear rose-coloured glasses any more, which should make it easier to see where I'm going.

Anyway, the parks discussed in this page have in common that they belong to a neighbourhood that's more than a little self-aware, and sees itself as transitional in relation to downtown, if not entirely outside it, kind of like Chinatown and Japantown in the first area I covered, the southeast.

As before, I'm going smallest to largest.  However, two pairs of parks, I'm unable to determine the relative sizes of, so have just put them in the order I visited them Sunday.

Cascade People's Center

This is the one I visited for the first time last night.  According to the King County Parcel Viewer, the entire block between Minor and Pontius Avenues N, and Harrison and Thomas Streets, belongs to the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  But I'm treating it in three parts.

The smallest of those is a building near the southeastern corner of the block.  Its website invites the right sorts of groups to rent it, but it's also the home to a bunch of activities, in which, near as I can tell from the ample signage on the doorway and elsewhere in the park, the YMCA takes the lead.  And this is also a building the nearby P-Patch's gardeners use to organise a food bank that then distributes the food in the nearby park.  The building has a plumbing system, but near as I can tell, doesn't have regular hours.  It seems to have opened in the late 1990s.

Neither of my night photos of its doorway really caught much of the total building presentation, which includes the name in big letters and a bunch of organisations' logos, above the door.  This is the less bad photo.

Cascade P-Patch

This is, like many P-patches, on parks department property.  It differs from most P-patches in two important ways.  One, it looks less orderly.  Of course, as in all P-patches, the gardeners here each have their own space to keep, but it finds ways to keep that from being the main impression at least this visitor got:

Two, it has, I think, something to do with the "Giving Garden" around which the food bank is organised.  I suspect many P-patches have some kind of relationship with local charities, but that seems to be considerably more organised and prominent at this one.  That said, I won't pretend to be an expert.  I did talk with some of the people setting up the food bank on Sunday, but not about what they were doing; sorry, dear Diary.  The P-patch's website says it opened in 1996.

Next up is the first of the pairs whose relative sizes I can't judge.

(Seattle City Light) Denny Substation

This is a partly-triangular space which, when Seattle City Light was building a Downtown Substation (the name given in Seattle's 2020 real property report), they decided to offer as a park in order to get enough credit to block a street, or some such.  Seattle Public Utilities parkifies its properties very often, and I've noted SCL doing good deeds like tiny house villages, but this is the first case I've encountered of SCL parkifying.  Anyway, this triangle is along Minor Ave between John St and Denny Way, with the broader part to the north, although that broader part doesn't actually reach John.

The main thing Denny Substation is about is an off-leash dog area.

Its major amenities are benches and bulletin boards, and these are carefully allocated, one each within and outside the dog area, but the non-dog area is so split up, the grassiest part dominated by an artwork I found ugly, that really, there isn't much reason for someone who doesn't keep dogs to visit the place.

Denny Substation opened in 2018.  As I understand it, the "temporary" off-leash area at Denny Park was meant to tide dog keepers over until Denny Substation opened.  I wonder how many more years it'll be before "temporary" gets removed from the name.  Not that I object to the off-leash area at Denny Park; what bothers me is the takeover of all of Regrade Park.

(Onni) Seattle Times Park

The Seattle Times seems to have tried several ways to parlay its headquarters area into South Lake Union real estate money, and the way that worked was giving up and selling, in 2013, to the Onni Group.  The latter wanted to build on the park, but local opposition sank that, and their revised plans actually call for them to expand it.  However, at present, Seattle Times Park, which is a small area on the southwest corner of Fairview Ave N and John St, isn't a park at all.

Those tents aren't homeless people's; they're open on their short ends, which homeless people's tents wouldn't be, and I assume they're there to protect people looking at blueprints and such.  While Onni is a-building, Seattle Times Park is a construction staging area, and I think I also saw signs of work on the park itself.

As I walked away on John (unaware that it doesn't go through to Denny Park), I noticed something very odd.

I mean, yes, it's odd to see hand-washing stations associated with construction workers' "sanican"s, odd in a good way, but it's much, much odder to see fourteen "sanican"s in a row like that, outside the construction fence, and unlocked.  It dawned on me that Onni was doing a surge, comparable to those in Iraq and Afghanistan years back.  Vandalising one lonely "sanican" might be exciting, but vandalising a row of fourteen of the things would be way too much like work.  There will never be enough homeless people there at one time to fill all fourteen, so Onni's workers won't be crowded out.  And so forth.  Dear Diary, I will recur to the surge metaphor in future pages, and regardless of my dislike for "sanican"s, I was thrilled to see such a clear demonstration of the power of surges.

The next two parks, I'm also unable to estimate the relative areas of, though both are definitely bigger than the two I've just discussed.  This first one is barely bigger than one acre.  I visited these two before the two above.

(SPU) Capitol Hill Water Quality Project

Trust SPU to find a boring name for something nice they do.  This is a project to keep Capitol Hill's stormwater from pouring unfiltered into Lake Union.  Instead it goes through bioswales laid out along Pontius and Yale Avenues N between Republican and Thomas Streets.  You can read all about it here (PDF), dear Diary.

Anyway, these are very pretty bioswales, created by removing a parking lane, and widening the sidewalks in the process.  On Pontius, with explanatory sign in front:

And on Yale:

It's recent, but although lots of people brag about it being nationally known (apparently CNN did a story), nobody seems to want to say when it opened, if "opened" is even the right word.

(REI) Unnamed park

This is the only park in this set with which I have a little bit of real history.  When I started shopping for sleeping bags, early in my homelessness in Seattle, I figured REI was the place to go.  Their prices soon convinced me otherwise; I ended up getting all my sleeping bags from a QFC, which however no longer wants to sell them, so I may have to go back to REI after all.  Anyway, I was befuddled by the presence of all this Nature outside a downtown store.

My, how my views have changed.  This may have been the single pleasantest part of my hike on Sunday.  This woods is on the northeast corner of Yale Ave and John St, running north along Yale and east along John, on each of which streets it has at least one entrance.

The store opened in 1996, so I doubt the woods is older.  I actually called there earlier this evening, asking whether it had a name, and none of the three people I spoke with knew of one; one said "It's our landscaping."  Uh huh.  It's a roughly one-acre park, and it ought to have a name, even though, but actually precisely because, naming something makes it harder to kill.

Cascade Playground

Dear Diary, I hope you aren't tired of this business of saving the biggest for last, but anyway this is the last iteration of it.

Cascade Playground has great edges:

surrounding a boring middle:

but maybe you can see, way in the background of that photo, the people setting up the food bank, which isn't boring at all.

I think that blue thing in the first photo above is the Little Free Library, in which I found mostly YA books, wanted several, but resisted taking any.  On a different level of reading, signs in and near Cascade Playground were what reminded me of REI's park and informed me of the Water Quality Project and the South Lake Union Community Center.  I think this park may really be, as its advocates certainly think, its neighbourhood's heart.

Most of what I want to say about Cascade Playground, though, has to wait for pages outside this series.  Later this week or maybe this coming weekend, I hope to show you, dear Diary, a greatly improved map of all these places I've been talking about.  And the artist credits will of course go into this series.  But otherwise, of course, I have to put plumbing forward again, which will take some time, and I have a number of other series planned, including one for this weekend.

My intention is to return to North Seattle with a water fountain hike in January.  One of the other series is also North Seattle-specific, but others are broader in scope.  So I hope, dear Diary, you aren't tired of excursions yet.

Anyway, until later, dear Diary.  Happy days and nights, and happy holidays, if it takes that long.  Good night.

A Hike in Northgate, part II

Dear Diary,

I trust I don't have to repeat the map from your last page?  (Hint to your readers:  Even when those readers are as few as y'all currently are, I can't really figure out whether anything I do is helpful or harmful unless y'all say something.)  This page is my discussion and photos of the last two parks I visited very close to Northgate Mall, and of the other, somewhat farther from the mall, half of a park whose very-close half I just described in that previous page.

Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel

Behind this stultifying name hides a charming, though peculiar, little park.  One of its peculiarities, as in most Seattle Public Utilities parks, is signboards informing the viewer of many aspects of the ideal handling of water.  But these signboards can also include more immediately useful things, such as maps of the park:

and of the Thornton Creek watershed of which it's a part:

I forget whether it was the balloons on the first map or on something I didn't photograph that told me where the entrance to the northeastern half of Beaver Pond Natural Area is, but the second map is what convinced me to try again with Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area.

The creek enters this park through an artificial waterfall:

and then passes under two bridges:

Between the bridges there are plenty of (metal) benches, and a few concrete benches in the middle, on the main side, plus there's a path on the other side, mainly, I think, so residents of buildings on that side can take stairways down to the park; but there's also a staff entrance to the creek valley, which the paths and bridges for the public don't provide access to, for, um, obvious reasons; and the other side has two benches.

I think this photo was just random:

 

I also took photos of the art, which is unified enough to be obviously the work of one person.  That person's name, according to a report on the park's 2009 completion (PDF), is Benson Shaw, which sounded familiar, but Google doesn't know of my having named him before.  Anyway, some of the art:

All in all, it's a rather nice place to spend some time, and can no doubt be educational too, if one allows it to.

Maple Leaf Community Garden

This is one of two P-Patches in North Seattle owned by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation rather than by the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods.  I've speculated on reasons why the parks department owns each; in this case, I suspect it's because of the gorgeous old tower there.  And I've told you that before, dear Diary, and even shown you photos of that tower, so I'll only add one more this time:

and note that this is another P-Patch with difficulties for the vertically challenged, but close with a more typical P-Patch picture:

Beaver Pond Natural Area, round 2

As I just said, a sign at the Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel mentioned a possible access point to this park's northeastern block, so I decided to try again, assuming I'd ever tried much the first time, which isn't clear from either my memory or your pages, dear Diary.

Actually, my memory is also having trouble with the map this time.  My best guess is that I tried the dead end of 9th Ave NE into this block's southern side first, but got nothing.  Then I certainly went up 8th Ave NE toward the putative entrance at NE 106th St.  Along the way, I took this photo, which from the map must be of the southwestern block:

Once on NE 106th St, I turned east, heading for its dead end.  This proved to be a parking lot; there were two trails going south, which presumably lead to the linkage between the blocks, and I took a photo from each:

But these trails both dead-ended themselves pretty quickly, which made me think they were probably unofficial trails made by hikers like me.  It turns out one can walk along the western edge of the block, north alongside the parking lot, this is pretty obviously an authorised trail (it has signs warning dog walkers not to leave Number Two behind, as I mentioned re Flicker Haven Natural Area a day or two ago), and it too has views of the creek:

but it also leads to a turn which basically provides free access to the northwestern half, the half north of the South Fork, of this block of Beaver Pond Natural Area.  Here one does feel rather primæval.

And from here I was able to clamber up the embankment to Roosevelt Way NE, rejoin the street grid, and go on to the next hike, from Victory Creek to Victory Heights, which it's now obvious I'll have to tell you, dear Diary, about in the morning.  Sweet dreams until then.

A Hike along Ballard's South Shore

Dear Diary,

Whew!  Almost done.  Just some hiking along Shilshole...

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

Well, but first, an old friend.

Salmon Bay Phase I and 

Salmon Bay Phase II

We've encountered this pleasant place at least twice before, dear Diary:  in "The Ballard Seacoast", part I, as Salmon Bay Natural Area; then in "Street Ends: Shilshole Bay", as the 34th Ave NW Street End.  Now above we see its name, or rather names, in the 2020 real property report.

Yet another photo of the place:

And I thought I'd photographed its signage before, but if so, I haven't showed it to you, dear Diary, so here it is:

It was fairly crowded, and I was worried about sunset coming, so I set off again.  The next two stops are also street ends, and are ten blocks apart each.

But I got distracted along the way.  At 30th, by the entrance to

The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and Carl S. English Jr Botanical Garden

Well, even before that, I had another try at photographing one of the tall reddish conifers that I suspect of being redwoods:

 

But then at the gate at 30th, I was gobsmacked to find it open.  Turns out it's back to regular hours:

and if the city ever slows down in the mistreatment of my former and perhaps future peers, so I can spare the time, I'd really like to go back there, tour the place, and tell you all about it, dear Diary.

Last time I visited the 28th Ave NW street end (as recounted in "Street Ends: North-west Salmon Bay"), there was a homeless madwoman there, and I complained that she'd obstructed my photography, so I considered trying again.  But there was another young woman there this time, and although she was to all appearances sane (and housed), I just put it off again.

Ship Canal Water Quality Project

Do you remember, dear Diary, how (in the same previous page), under the influence of a false understanding of street ends, I professed uncertainty in identifying the 24th Ave NW street end?  Well, it turns out the alternative I thought was probably wrong was actually spectacularly wrong.  The building uphill from the actual street end, adjacent to the supposed one, is apparently the headquarters of the whole tunnel-building project.  And its backyard is yet another of the construction sites.

I was dithering about what to photograph when I noticed two geese:

and decided to get out of their way, after taking one photo to prove I'd been there:

Now, near as I can tell, there's been a vast amount of street work going on in Ballard to fix the "missing link" of the Burke-Gilman Trail.  So I decided to try to take the Trail from this site to the last one, instead of Shilshole.  That worked out poorly; I probably wasn't on the actual trail, but anyway came up to a fence that sternly warned against trespassing on the gravel wasteland beyond, as if anyone would want to.  Suddenly Shilshole, right next door, seemed much more appealing.

Shilshole Ave NW itself is actually not that bad, if one knows in advance that all the sidewalks are on the north side of the street.  It's just that it's usually unpleasant before one gets onto it, and it's usually unpleasant after one leaves it, too, walking in the street, on gravel, into oncoming cars' paths, and other nuisances.  This time my negative thoughts as I left Shilshole turned toward the fact that I'd lately kept running into geese, but never ducks any more.  Had we humans just gotten too obtrusive again, and all the ducks I'd seen last year had gone into hiding?  As I thought this, I am truly not making this up, I noticed someone yelling rather loudly ahead of me, over and over, and as I came closer the yells sounded more and more like quacks, and lo:

This particular duck was genuinely aggravated about something, and wouldn't let me get any closer, but I was still thrilled to see it, and continued in a much more cheerful frame of mind to my last stop:

14th Ave NW Boat Ramp

This park hasn't had a "sanican" like its peer on Sunnyside Ave N in the past, and it hasn't acquired one either, let alone a water fountain:

I told you, dear Diary, much too long ago now, that I had errands in Ballard.  They were both in the shopping along Leary, and I'd run one before going north to Greg's Garden and Gilman Playground.  The other was getting groceries at Fred Meyer, and so, having as it turned out beaten sunset by fifteen minutes, I turned to grocery shopping, and getting home in the much greater cold than when I'd set out, and other things that you, as my parks diary, needn't hear about.

It'll be a little while before my next hike.  Happy days until then, dear Diary.

Another Hike along Lake Union and the Fremont Cut

Dear Diary,

There are lots of places to tell you about in this page, and lots of photos to show you, and I think the ground rules are by now pretty clear, so let's get started, shall we?  This page includes the only bona fide park I found by doing this in the first region I hiked.

This page's predecessor is "While Strolling in the Parks One Day", part II.

EDIT 5/11:  Map (the new bona fide park is "C"):

Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp

Despite its omission from the 2021 real property report, this park, which is the one I forgot to visit last Saturday, is still there:

and still has a "sanican", presumably for the benefit not only of boaters but also of the vehicle campers still parked nearby:

Harbor Patrol and Shop

This is ostentatiously not open to the public, and also neither parklike nor photogenic, so I took no photos, but it would be silly not to mention it at all.

It's sort of within the western side of Gas Works Park, whose restrooms were still open and whose water fountain was still not running.

North Transfer Station

and its Playground

When I lived in an SRO, as a "hotel" it didn't have to comply with city trash rules, so it didn't.  I therefore trudged to the North Transfer Station fairly regularly to get rid of my recycling.  Then I became homeless; although recycling while I stayed on Capitol Hill and downtown was a bit of a challenge, once I lived at the University I saw no reason to go anywhere else to dispose of my trash.  Moreover, the station was closed from 2014 to 2016 for a complete rebuild.  So I hadn't come back since it re-opened, and it looks like a lot of other people haven't come back either.  I'd found Meridian Playground and Gilman Playfield both crowded both days, but didn't see another human being the entire time I toured this one.

Yes, really, there's now an actual playground at the North Transfer Station.  If approached from the south, the label "playground" might be a bit confusing, because while there are nice wooden benches:

and a proper half-court for basketball:

all there is for "play" equipment is these space-age-ish structures obviously for grown-ups:

(notice the instruction panel in the background).

It turns out that the playground proper is across N 35th St, between Carr Place N and Woodlawn Ave N:

and at 2:17 P.M. on a Wednesday, there were no children there.

Clearly something has gone wrong with this playground's publicity, but there may be another factor.  Wallingford Playfield has restrooms open all year.  Meridian Playground's are open anyway about seven months of the year.  This one?  In principle it has restrooms, in the building:

but we all know what happened to those:

Anyway.  There is also public art, by Jean Shin, using materials from the old building:

The business side of the site is apparently open to the public again after all, but that wasn't what the sign said:

I did glimpse an employee running to her car here.  Anyway, I figured if I wasn't welcome I should leave, and did so, but first took a picture of the promised "sanican", which would be in the left background if it were visible in the photo above:

3500 Interlake Ave N

This site across 35th from the station has a big fence around it, so I didn't take any pictures, but one of the signs on the fence explains that what's being built there is a tunnel for storage of storm water overflows.

The Burke-Gilman Trail

There's a "sanican" a little way south of where the trail intersects Stone Way N.  It evidently isn't city-funded, or they would've claimed credit for it in the map I hiked to check in January, but it's only locked so as to keep it from being locked, see:

 

Land under Fremont Bridge

I'm not actually sure this rather large site, with the notional address of 3101 Fremont Ave N, is actually in Fremont as opposed to Queen Anne, but if it is in Fremont, it's a parking lot.

Lake WA Ship Canal Tower 2

This is infrastructure, and has nothing to do with restrooms or homeless people, but it's very public, very photogenic, and in a park.  Everyone who traverses this part of the Burke-Gilman Trail passes under it.  So here's a photo:

Whew.  One more "another" hike, and after that most hikes will include both parks and other city stuff.  Until later, dear Diary.