Under Construction, part III: A.B. Ernst Park Before

Dear Diary,

Please inform any reader of this part who really loves A.B. Ernst Park, and who is reading before sunset on April 2nd, that they should stop reading right now and go make some last memories in the park they love.  Because on April 3rd, trees are going to start being taken out.

So at this point, your readers, dear Diary, are either people who don't love that park, or are reading after sunset, right?

This reminds me that I don't know, and haven't known for a long time, who reads you, dear Diary.  Strictly speaking, I don't even know that anyone reads you; for all I know, the numbers I see are all artificial intelligences being trained.  But even if that's not so, I mustn't assume any baseline level of familiarity with the work I've done with your excellent help.

So.  Dear Diary, you are a blog about public amenities, and especially about public restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and public water fountains that are outside.  Most of these things are in parks, and because variety is the spice of life, sometimes, as now, I just do some park appreciation without talking about plumbing at all.  The area we've focused on is the northern part, a sort of peninsula, of the City of Seattle, in a northern border state of the United States.

At one of the peninsula's southern tips, towards the middle east-west, is a neighbourhood called Fremont that likes to call itself the centre of the universe.  Parts of Fremont and its more staid eastern neighbour Wallingford are pretty hilly, and possibly as a result, three of their parks have as their raisons d'etre that they allow people to traverse those hills.

The Wallingford Steps are the flashy sibling, made of concrete but with spectacular artistic adornment, plus, yes, some plants.  They're the most successful as stairs, too, linking N 34th St with N Northlake Way, and, across that perilous street, with Gas Works Park and the Burke-Gilman Trail.

Troll's Knoll Park is the plain, friendly sibling; challenged to praise it, Seattle Parks calls it "sustainable".  It connects N 36th St with N 38th St adjacent to Aurora Ave N.  Just east of its bottom is the Fremont Troll; at its top is the Troll's Knoll P-Patch.

But A. B. Ernst Park almost ignores its stairs, which unimpressively go from N 35th St to the next alley south.  Instead it focuses on being a quite beautiful park, one worth spending time in. 

But tomorrow, motivated mainly by access and activation, Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation will start changing A. B. Ernst Park.  I would be pretty shocked if the result of the changes isn't loved, by some, within a year or three - Seattle Parks generally knows what it's doing.  But that doesn't mean I can't celebrate the old version.

I learnt on my second recent visit that what I see as this park's signature element is not what everyone sees.  I went across the street and discovered that what drivers see is mostly a couple of giant street trees.  But if, like me, you walk west from the Fremont branch library (soon to close itself for construction), there's no doubt at all that A. B. Ernst Park is mainly about these spectacular pillar-like trees.

These are arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis).  Another species that's prominent in the park is bald cypress (Taxodium distichum).  And how, you may ask, dear Diary, do I know these things, having never displayed any botanical knowledge before?  Alas, this is how:

There are many signs like that attached to specific trees; there are also quite a few on the ground.  Other trees bear different symbols:

Well, as I mentioned not too long ago, dear Diary, I'm having technical difficulties.  Let me describe the planned work, and then close with two more photos.

Most people, I think, understand this park as a winding path with a weird structure in the middle, sort of a crude theatre.  The occasion for the work is that Parks acquired a bit of land east of the park.  So they're moving the path eastward, and widening it, because even though the park's current page says it "provides wheelchair access", paths can never be too wide when considering Access.

And then they're giving the space thus created at the west end of the park to Activation.  A picnic table will be where the park entrance now is, and south of the table will be an "embankment slide" with "hillside loops".  That area will rejoin the main path at the head of the stairs.

If I'm reading the plans right, it's a goal to keep the theatre-like area, and the artwork that surrounds it (Water Mover by Jenny Heishman) more or less intact.  But they're planning to remove half of the arborvitae, so I expect it to be a long time before the park feels right to me.

Well, dear Diary, writing this part in you on my phone has been horribly time-consuming, so I'm going to have to find a better way soon.  Until then, happy days and nights.  The first photo below shows arborvitae, theatre and Water Mover, while the second shows the stairs at the bottom of the park.

 

 

 

Peace Park Today

Dear Diary,

It's been a long time, hasn't it?  Some things have changed in Blogspot, and I'm not sure how I'll deal with those going forward, but anyway, that's why the photo in this page is so huge.

I went on a long hike today, and my path took me through Peace Park.  It seemed weirdly deserted and non-descript, just a rather dry lawn with some unobtrusive interruptions.  For what seemed like minutes I couldn't find the park sign, and wondered if it had been taken down.  Not so, but the only thing it brags about is the sculpture "Sadako and the Thousand Cranes", and that sculpture is still achingly absent.

But people remember it:

I'm sure I haven't read everything that's been said about the violent theft of that sculpture, but in what I have read, I've seen nothing about any possibility of replacing it.  Seems to me that the alternative is to tar ourselves with the guilt of the thief, to say we aren't good enough for a statue like that any more.  Anyway, I think this possibility of a new sculpture should at least be raised, and, if possible, handed for a decision to the people who left all those flowers, or people who remember how to make origami cranes, or like that.

Good night, dear Diary.  I'm still not sure when we'll meet again.

Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part VI: Southeast

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry it's so late.  I've been reading UW's planning documents and lost track of time.

This part concerns the hikes of December 22nd, 2020 (except for Fritz Hedges Waterway Park, my photos of which from that date already appeared in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", January 2021); October 8th, 2022 (Fritz Hedges and Sakuma Viewpoint only); and October 29th (the other two only).

Anyway, here's the map:

I took the opportunity to make a few corrections.

Let's get started!

Sakuma Viewpoint (W on map)

I already introduced this place in "Street Ends: North Union and Portage Bays" in December 2020, but even though I already had a lot more photos of it by then, restrained myself to the three appropriate to that series.  So five of the photos in this part are of Sakuma Viewpoint as of 23 months ago.

Sakuma Viewpoint is in a tangled ownership state.  In my oldest map of UW, dated October 2017, the one I used in making all these hikes, it's coloured in as part of West Campus.  But when I visited the Husky Union Building for the buildings of UW project, I found two more recent maps, one from September 2019, and one from February 2021 (inside a Visitors Guide 2022).  And neither of those shows Sakuma Viewpoint coloured in as part of any campus.  The current UW Seattle Campus Master Plan (327-page PDF), however, on page 27, which lists property owned by others within the campus, notes that only the part of Sakuma Viewpoint which is also the Brooklyn Ave NE Street End is not owned by the UW (because of the 1990s land grab which the street end program basically is).

Anyway, Sakuma Viewpoint is one of the nicest campus parks.  It and Olympic Vista (which is not one of the nicest campus parks) are the only West Campus parks the master plan commits the UW to preserving (page 41; and it reserves the right to make Olympic Vista better).  So that December I took lots of photos.  If Sakuma Viewpoint were all Brooklyn Street End, it would be hands-down the best street end in North Seattle, but since I don't know where the property lines are, I simply left it out of candidacy for that honour.

First of all, I should give credit where it's due to Agua Verde Café next door.  In December 2020, lockdowns still everywhere, I found this sign:

Unfortunately, my jubilation at finding this out was immediately tempered by another sign:

I don't remember now when I first found the current "No Public Restrooms" sign; that part of campus was never a high priority for me.

Anyway, here are my December 2020 photos of, and, since it is a viewpoint, from Sakuma Viewpoint:

At the time I was under the misapprehension that Fritz Hedges Waterway Park, next door, didn't have wooden benches, so I was very pleased to find so many at this place.  It also has great views; of course, so does Fritz Hedges, but (given that I rarely visit that park either, when I do visit) often other people have beaten me to the places those views can be seen from.

Also, because for years I used UW's restrooms, and had just found a set theoretically open to me even during the lockdowns, I was prepared to forgive Sakuma Viewpoint not having any; but I already knew by then that the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation had been urged to include restrooms in Fritz Hedges Waterway Park and had refused.  (Which made the hike of December 22, 2020 rather painful, eventually.)

On October 8, knowing I had all these, and finding the place fairly crowded, I settled for a single achievable landscape:

Isn't it weird, dear Diary, how much greener Seattle is in late December than in early October?

Fritz Hedges Waterway Park (X on map)

Knowing that I'd already shown you, dear Diary, lots of photos of this bona fide Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park, I settled for one this time too:

No, correction, two:  I also photographed the parking lot this park so urgently needed even though it didn't need any restrooms:

Fishery Sciences Courtyard (Y on map)

What got me started reading planning documents today was that I was looking for a reference in one of them to this courtyard for an official name.  But in the master plan Final Environmental Impact Statement, Volume 1 (819-page PDF), page 230, it only refers to it loosely and under a name that doesn't sound right:  "the Aquatic and Fishery Sciences courtyard".  That's not what that building's signage calls it.  So I used this name.

Open Street Map calls it "Tikvah's Garden", and thereon hangs a tale.  Tikvah Weiner, 1978-2013, was dying of cancer when she enunciated a wish to see a garden established, from which students in her department (Environmental Studies) and other departments could learn.  She wanted this garden to be built north of John M. Wallace Hall, where she'd worked.  After her death, somewhere along the way the project was moved to the larger space of the courtyard under discussion here.

Money was raised for it, and in 2017 a request for funds was made to the Campus Sustainability Fund, which awarded about half the amount requested and reports to the world that the project is in "post-implementation phase".  Indeed, in September 2017 Weiner's department announced it themselves, with lots of photos.

Here are my photos from December 2020:

Notice those weirdly curved benches on the paved area.  I've been reluctant to sit on them, but I sure think they look neat.  They turn out to be the work of students in the Department of Landscape Architecture.

That's Fishery Sciences, specifically the seductive series of eight doors on its southern east wall, in the background.

Here I'm looking east toward parking lot W35.  This must be the planted part of Tikvah's Garden.

And here I'm looking a bit north of east, toward Fishery Sciences' southern end, at what remained of the original lawn.  I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't have considered this courtyard a park at all without the work done on the garden.

Now, the public part of the courtyard is boxed in between three things.  In 2021, the Haring Center, in the South Campus, got a big donation to enable renovations.  This matters because the building basically houses a school largely (though not entirely) for disabled kids, but parts of it weren't ADA-compliant.  So the school's staff were ecstatic about the prospect of renovations, but had to move the school out while the work is done.

So parking lot W35 now holds a bunch of large sheds or small buildings which currently house the school.  A large planted area just west of parking lot W35 is fenced off with orange netting to protect several trees and one very long log.  And the paved area is fenced off with a real fence to hold the playground equipment.  What's left is a paved path from one end to the other, with a grassy area where those cool-looking benches now are on one side of it, and something like an incipient jungle on the other.  There's a gravel path through the growth, but I found that thorny sticks had fallen partway over it, so I couldn't pass unscathed.

I thought I'd found the tree I'd originally photographed:

Those hoardings are from the school; I think that tree is now surrounded by the playground.  What I'm less clear on is how I could've seen W35 from east of this tree.  Anyway, here's the would-be jungle:

And here's my best guess as to what's become of the lawn I photographed two years ago:

So I don't know much about Tikvah's Garden, but I've told you, dear Diary, everything I can currently figure out about the Fishery Sciences courtyard, which isn't much either.  Except what I'm saving for tomorrow's part of both this page and the buildings one.

The Burke-Gilman Trail (Z on map)

In counting Brooklyn's parks, I neglected the fact that this concerns two different areas.  Each is a big grassy sward adjacent to the trail, and each has picnic tables and benches.  I'm only using my photos from December 2020 here; the only change worth mentioning is poorly illustrated by my October photos.

The bigger one (mapped as Z2) is between University Way and Brooklyn Ave:

It has three of those picnic tables; I think that photo shows all of them (two very small).  The smaller is between Brooklyn and (on the north only) Cowlitz Road.  It has one picnic table and one bench.

This one is right next to the Brooklyn Trail Building, where the Center for Child and Family Well-Being used to be.  So I always figured it was more or less the back yard for the kids to play in, and tried to limit my use of that bench.

Unfortunately, this one is now going to seed.  In each of my visits to this area the past couple of months, I've found the same discarded items just lying there.  I don't know whether this is because UW (which owns the Burke-Gilman on campus, as I've already told you, dear Diary) is short of grounds keepers, or because the School Psychology Clinic now in the Center's former home doesn't get visits from kids who need the space any more, or what exactly.

So that's another sad ending, dear Diary.  I'll have to see whether I can contrive a happy one for tomorrow's page.  Until then, a good night and a good day.

Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part III: Southwest and Its Sweeps

Dear Diary,

None of the individual parts of this page concern all six hikes its title mentions; but this one concerns four of them, the next part too; all the others discuss only three.  Let's look at the whole set here:

• On December 22nd, 2020, I went hiking throughout southern Brooklyn, city and university parks both.  I ended up using some of the photos of the city ones in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal" on January 1st, 2021, and deleted those from my phone as usual, so all I have left from this date are photos of places I associated with the university.  This hike hasn't featured in the previous parts but is in all the remaining ones.
  
• On October 8th, 2022 I started hiking this area focusing on properties listed in the City of Seattle's 2020 Real Property Report.  This hike is in all the parts except part V, assuming I get that far.
  
• On October 16th I went back, focusing on areas that looked park-like in Open Street Map.  This hike is in all the parts except this one and part VI.
  
• On October 23rd I re-visited I-5 lands; photos from this hike were in parts I and II.  I-5 this far south is well above street level, so there aren't any photos from this hike in this part.  And the remaining parts of this page are east of I-5, so they won't have any either.
  
• On October 25th I photographed two sweep notices in the area this part covers.  So none of the other parts have photos from this date.
  
• And on October 29th I re-photographed the areas of which I still had December 22nd, 2020 photos, because I thought I needed to re-visit them all before telling you, dear Diary, about them anyway.  This part and all those remaining have photos from this hike.
  

This part not only features the most hikes, it also features the most places; even after I took the forgotten island in NE 40th St out of this part, it still has six left to talk about, as does part V; the others, three or four.

As in previous parts and previous pages from my October hikes to Ravenna and the U-District, in each individual part or page I'm going in order of the hikes.

So we start with:

805 NE Northlake Place (H on map)

Oh, oops, I've written myself out of having space for the map in the introduction, haven't I?  But let's continue that for a moment while I show you, dear Diary, the first of the December 2020 photos of places I thought belonged to the university.  In this case, the university's map agrees with the King County Parcel Viewer that I thought correctly.

My unreliable memory claims that I was struck, as I trudged from the Burke-Gilman Trail and North Passage Point back towards campus that day, by this explosion of green (in December, mind!) in a rather grittily urban neighbourhood.

Oh, neighbourhood, map, right?  Here:

That's the only place in this area of which I still have a December 22nd, 2020 photo, dear Diary.

So going on with October 8th:

North Passage Point (I on map)

This park was actually the reason I picked this region to start with.  I'd gone through the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation list of parks and found no additions in North Seattle, but one subtraction:  this park.

Most of it is the property of the State of Washington Department of Transportation, which has apparently stopped leasing it to the parks department and fenced it off because of chips of concrete falling from the I-5 bridge.  A host of sites still document it, but not the parks department's, so apparently the department's taken down its web page.

But such measures don't actually lead to actual land disappearing from the face of the Earth, so I went there to see what I could see.

What I saw was a fenced-off park.  I saw a man inside the fence to dip his toes in the water, who clambered over a shorter fence adjacent to leave; I saw a woman inside the fence to walk her dog, but she left on the other side, so I don't know how she left.

The shorter fence is in the photo immediately above.  But you see, dear Diary, there's also a gate, and if that woman had a key, she might've used that:

The side I was on while taking the first three photos is the parks department's side, which is not fenced off.  It includes the sidewalk whose decorations I praised on first visiting this park early in your life so far, dear Diary, and it includes some grassy land, on which, on this visit, I found an encampment of tents, presumably including homeless people.  Neither of the people I saw inside the fence lived there.

Northlake Park (J on map)

This "park" is simply an overlook adjacent to the sidewalk.  Well, the 2020 real property report claims it occupies 1,660 square feet, which implies that the land below the sidewalk, seaward, is the real park, but that's fenced off.  So most of my photos of this park have been views, and so's this one:

For much more about this park, see "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", linked up top.

Eastlake Ave NE Street End (K on map)

For much more about this park (not belonging to the parks department, and frankly not much of a park), see the street end page that includes it.

Peace Park (L on map)

My main concern in re-visiting all the parks in this region was to see what had changed.  Specifically whether water fountains had been added, for example, but also to see what had been subtracted from North Passage Point.  Or here.

That statue is "Sadako and the Thousand Cranes", made in 1990 by Daryl Smith, who is not the glass artist born circa 1973 and is not the artist in wood who was a school principal in Indiana at the time (LinkedIn link, requires sign-in), but is surprisingly poorly documented considering he also made the Jimi Hendrix and other rock legend statues on Capitol Hill.  And what has changed is that Sadako (portraying Sasaki Sadako, 1943-1955) doesn't have anything, not cranes, not candies, not nuthin'.

Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop (M and brick-red line on map)

I still haven't done enough research to reconcile the widely varying online accounts of Cheshiahud, an Indian with whom the 19th century settlers of Seattle interacted.  But at least I've finally paid enough attention to the flimsy little markers with which this sort of virtual trail, made out of existing roads, trails, and whatnot, is pointed out, to establish its path in the U-District.  Which led me to the shocking discovery that the parks department page links to a perfectly good map (1-page PDF) that could've saved me the trouble.  I think when I first downloaded that map on my phone, I couldn't get the phone's software to fix its mis-orientation, so forgot about it.  But I think one of the photos I took documenting my not so trail-blazing effort is worth showing you anyway, dear Diary:

So enough park appreciation.  We now take some time out for sweeps.

805 NE Northlake Place

On the 23rd, visiting various I-5 patches of land, I'd come to the conclusion that the land from 40th to 42nd had been swept.  This surprised me, because I knew that WSDOT had been criticised by homeless-haters as far too slow to sweep encampments for their tastes. [1]  So on the 25th, I went back to see whether my conclusion was right, and concluded, as related to you, dear Diary, in part II, that it probably wasn't.

[1] For more on WSDOT and sweeps, see an article by Leo Brine in Publicola on a bill that ultimately failed.

I don't have a clear record of what I did after that on the 25th, but anyway, I eventually came back here.  And found that a bunch of RVs that had been parked just north of here, essentially blocking drivers from reaching the end of Northlake Place, had been swept that very day, probably while I'd been dithering over I-5 land.  The only notice I found was this one:

Now, this came as a complete surprise to me.  Not the sweep, that is, but the notice.  I'd seen a sweep notice just two weeks before, issued in mid-September.

The two most obvious differences are that the new ones are much easier to read, and don't have dates issued.  The more I thought about it, the more confident I became that they weren't sweep notices at all, but notices following a sweep, intended to help people reclaim their property (or at least, ostensibly so intended).  So I freaked out all over again.  Had Seattle finally decided to stop warning people of imminent sweeps?

North Passage Point

It's certainly gotten looser in its legalese:

Unless I'm living on a different planet from the writer of that notice, North Passage Point isn't in "Burke Gilman Trail to NE Northlake Way and from Eastlake Pl NE to Pasadena Pl NE", it's south of NE Northlake Way.

So I went home and wrote to two real journalists who might be interested, neither of whom has replied so far.  And I stewed.  But six days later, when I came back to re-photograph the university parks of West Campus...

805 NE Northlake Place

I found two RVs parked along Northlake Place again, and the owner of one, who called himself Red, hailed me.  He told me he'd been on the streets most of the time since he was ten years old, and he was 42 at the time.  He said they had in fact gotten notice - visitors.  He also said his RV didn't run, needed a new engine which he couldn't afford.  Which I interpreted as meaning that his RV had been towed (either by the sweepers, or by a friend beforehand), and then returned to him.

So I still don't know whether Seattle is continuing to post sweep notices, physical objects that nosy people like me can see, as opposed to just notifying people they find on-site.  But it isn't (at least in this case) doing something as obviously wicked as not warning people at all that their lives will be up-ended.

Which brings me to the last photos in this photo-heavy part, since I then took a closer look at the explosion of greenery.  It turns out not to be so very green.  In fact, there's a big clearing in the middle of this vacant block.

Although I wanted to spend today at home, I panicked when I saw that both Open Street Map and Google Maps show a building on this block.  Had I gotten something catastrophically wrong?

The Department of Neighborhoods has a photo of a building, dated 2002.

The Department of Finance and Administrative Services has an April 2015 notice that the property is for sale (6-page PDF).  The city had acquired it in 1971 thinking it would need it for work being done at the time on Pacific St (which Northlake Way turns into there).  At the time a sculptor they call Theodore Jonsson already leased the land, and the city had renewed the lease as recently as 2014 (10-page PDF), but that was due to expire in 2019.  They worried that his sculptural work, in metal, had led to environmental contamination.

As it turned out, Jonsson, who'd been born in 1933, died in June 2015 at his daughter's house.

So the damage to the land, and a few bits and pieces, are what's left of the building.  This is a surprisingly recent park; its life as such can't have begun before 2015, which means the nearly two years between December 2020 and today are a significant part of its lifespan so far.  That it's come this far without, possibly, any real work by anyone, is impressive.

Meanwhile, I got the impression that Jonsson was another poorly documented sculptor, but that's because I'd looked for him as Theodore.  Turns out there are several pages memorialising "Ted Jonsson" and depicting his art.  He was an important advocate for the 1% for art policy, and an early beneficiary too.  His art isn't much to my taste, but I've liked plenty of other work paid for with 1%, so on balance, I'm grateful.  And also for whatever hypothetical pollution he may have produced that's intimidated anyone from building on his studio's former site.

So, dear Diary, another part with an ambiguously happy ending.  Good night, and happy hours until we meet again tomorrow.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VIIB: Northeast (central group)

Dear Diary,

This is the smallest group of parks to cover in northwestern downtown.  There are seven in the remaining group; as I just told you, there are at least seven, more likely eight, in the group already covered in a page I thought pretty thorough at six.  But this group, as far as I know, consists of only four parks.  On the other hand, one is Seattle's oldest park, and one of the biggest downtown, which means, in the order of increasing size this series follows, it comes last in this page.

South Lake Union Community Center

The smallest park in what amounts to northwestern northeast downtown is one that doesn't exist yet.  I read a couple of articles last night about the city's sale of the "Mercer Mega Block", bounded by Dexter and 9th Avenues, Roy and Mercer Streets, in 2019.  (Actually, Google now tells me, three articles:  one, two, three.)  But I'm not telling you about it to judge it, dear Diary, but to note that once the block, currently looking like this:

gets built, it's supposed, by contract, to include a 30,000 square foot community center, which is to be rent-free for the city for forty years.  The "rent-free" obviously means the city learnt its lesson from the Belltown Community Center fiasco (though it leaves a nasty surprise for some mayor decades hence); but the 30,000 means it's to be over ten times as large as the Belltown CC as was combined with the International District-Chinatown one.

One implication:  The city probably isn't going to build its own Belltown CC.

If the center gets built, I'm guessing it would probably be bigger than this next park.

(Amazon) Grand Plaza

Well, yes, that's a pretentious name, but if you were a corporate titan putting a park adjacent to your headquarters, would you settle for less?  This plaza faces west toward Terry Ave between Republican and Harrison Streets, and I don't know when it opened - 2017 or earlier.

But it's at least a pretty good plaza.  Amazon obviously found a park designer (or more than one) willing to work with the basic idea of a concrete plaza, and talented enough to make it physically interesting even apart from such hyper-kinetic efforts to "activate" it as pursued, for example, by the Downtown Seattle Association in Westlake Park.  And then gave that designer or designers carte blanche.  They did not fall for the common tech-bro trap of thinking they knew better than the experts, and they did not stint.

My first photo can't appear in this series, but my second was of triple trash:

And after the basics came, well, not quite awe, but admiration, anyhow:

A couple of detail notes:  One sign that Amazon gave the designer(s) freedom is all those stairs.  They did install a ramp, but it doesn't go everywhere the stairs do.

And as I've already mentioned, this park's interactive electronic doodad for the holidays didn't excite me.  It's a series of rings which are supposed to provide a sonic experience as one walks through them.  (Um, again with disability blockage.  Maybe all the stairs were originally Amazon's idea after all?)  Well, having seen it done, I did walk through them, but heard nothing, and, um, the walk by itself is nothing special.

Still, Amazon's Grand Plaza is a reasonable park for the go-getters of South Lake Union, and was, at the beginning of my hike yesterday, a very pleasant surprise for me.

(?Vulcan) Denny Playfield

There are worse ways to do private parks.

I haven't found any reference to how long Denny Playfield, which is about the western 2/3 of the block between 9th and Westlake Avenues, John St and Denny Way, has been what it is now:  a big, boring lawn leading up to a full basketball court with benches and a water fountain adjoining.  (The court hasn't been re-lined in way too long, though.)

 

Apparently Paul Allen, i.e. Vulcan, bought it by the mid-1990s.  In 2014 they proposed to build on top, but nothing happened, except that sometime between then and now, the already private park got made more private, accessible by rental only:

Now there are signs about a "Proposed Land Use Action", but between the graffiti and the haze induced by changing computer systems at the renamed city department involved, I can't tell whether the signs are years or months old:

The "South Lake Union Discovery Center" next to Denny Playfield has been closed ever since the pandemic began, while museums in general have been cautiously re-opening.

Turns out this is because it isn't a museum, it's really a rental hall decorated with Vulcan's plans for developing South Lake Union.  This Center, like the playfield next to it, is frozen in time, waiting for a wrecking ball that may never come, about as un-South Lake Union as anything can be.

Denny Park

This is the third-biggest city park downtown, after Freeway and Myrtle Edwards Parks; it occupies the whole area from Dexter to 9th Avenues and from John St to Denny Way.  (Yes, that means Denny Playfield is right next to Denny Park.)  It's also the oldest city park by general acclamation, having been turned over to the city in 1884.

So it's had a long, complicated history, well covered by Don Sherwood (nearly 1M PDF).

If I understand Sherwood correctly, its present incarnation goes back to the 1940s.  It's a striking one:  the park is now a Classical garden.  Order and symmetry are its watchwords.

 

On top of that, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation headquarters are here.

 

I imagine it must have hurt department staffers a lot to tolerate a homeless encampment in Denny Park last year, and now I understand why that was one of the first encampments swept when the city got tired of obeying the CDC.

The photos above come from November 26.  This is the park I came back to tonight, convinced I hadn't done enough to show how classical it really is.  Unfortunately, since my last night visit, a mediocre but effusive job of Christmas lighting has pervaded the walkways that are one of the hallmarks of the park's classical style, so only two of tonight's photos really show anything other than those lights.  It isn't really a classical garden, because it has reasonably big stands of trees:

And yet it is, because of those sweeping, oh so orderly, walkways:

The park has two notable, recentish features carefully fitted into place between the walkways:  a playground, and a supposedly "temporary" dog off-leash area, my photo of which didn't work at all.

Speaking of temporary, so, dear Diary, will sleep be for me tonight, but I'd better get started with it.  I'll try to tell you about the ridiculously numerous parks of Cascade tomorrow night.  Good night(s) and good day(s) until then.