Building a Baseline, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

While we can do lots of fun things together, including the current page "Under Construction", your core topic is public restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and outdoor water fountains, public or private.

As I told you two years ago, I categorise the hikes in which I document that core topic:  "everything", "water fountain" or "restroom".  Something I didn't mention two years ago is that in the hikes of January 2021, which were restroom hikes, I tried to take "postcard shots", photos making these mostly pretty pedestrian buildings look as good as I could.  This hasn't been much of an issue since then, because I haven't had occasion to introduce any new restrooms to you, dear Diary.  However, in "Under Construction" and in this page, that will finally change.  So postcard shots will come back.

The hikes I started in July are intended to be everything hikes.  This part of this page has four remaining topics:

1. Why bother?
2. What's everything? (sources of information)
3. What will I do? (photographic practice)
4. What will I write? (organisation of this page)

Why bother?

Your friend and mine, Anna Patrick, formerly of The Seattle Times's Project Homeless, asked me in summer 2023 why I'd continued writing you, dear Diary, after getting housed in March 2021.  The easy part of the answer was that I hadn't then even finished writing up the January 2021 hikes, and then there was the second Durkan Drought that year, by which I mean then-mayor Jenny Durkan's decision to misread CDC guidance on public water fountains to justify leaving park water fountains turned off.

The hard part is, why after that?  I mean, dear Diary, you were obviously born of a pandemic that's now been over for years.  Why continue you?

Because if park restrooms and water fountains ever matter again, it'll be easier to pay attention to them if you, and the tools I've accumulated to write you, are still around.

There are three obvious contexts in which those things could matter.

• The Big One.
• Another pandemic.
• A scandal.

I'm pretty sure most park plumbing is not earthquake-safe.  I don't actually think, dear Diary, you'll be able to help much after the Big One.

I don't much like to think about scandals, but it's less likely that one will happen involving park restrooms in North Seattle if you exist.  You've already been part of the pressure on Seattle's leaders to address the scandalous lack of public restrooms downtown.

But the main reason to keep you going, dear Diary, is that another pandemic could come.  It's true that this country went about a century without any, so this would seem to be a long shot.  But the more certain politicians try to criminalise the practice of public health, the more chance there is for the next pandemic to come a great deal sooner, and when it does, it will probably come in the five months of the year when about half of Seattle's park restrooms are closed.

Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation has a plan to make its restrooms winter-safe, but it sure doesn't talk much about that plan.  What I found in January 2021 was that Parks claimed to be doing things differently because of the pandemic, and in some important ways those claims were true.  But they'd opened no additional restrooms, and diseases like cholera briefly returned to Seattle.  That plan is important, and you, dear Diary, and I, can help cover it.

What's everything?

Why do an everything hike?

Because I don't have a reliable list of water fountains.

Your frenemy Rachel Schulkin is now, according to LinkedIn, an Executive Operations Manager for the city; according to PubliCola, she oversees "parks, libraries, Seattle Center, and the waterfront".

So I wrote to Christina Hirsch, the remaining "media contact" for Parks.  I heard back from a general public questions address.  Fine.  I have to prove myself again. I can do that.

They sent me to two GIS/data analytics pages.

The one for restrooms is pretty good, and I've found it reliable so far.  My main concern with it is that I couldn't find a way to download the dataset.

The one for water fountains, however, while easily downloaded, is disturbingly familiar.  It not only resembles the list I got in 2020, it could be that list.  It also claims all water fountains in North Seattle are working, and although an awful lot really are, that claim turns out not to be true in detail.

So, about existence, there are false negatives (Soundview Playfield now has multiple water fountains) and false positives (Licton Springs Park now has no water fountain).  And, yes, it lists Baker Park on Crown Hill, which, the last time I went there, I was told has never had a water fountain.

There are no false negatives about function, because the map doesn't admit any fountains aren't working.  Well, I've actually been impressed at the fountains I've found operating, the parks department does deserve to brag, but there are exceptions.

So if I have to go to Baker Park, why not go to all of them?

Concretely, as I mentioned in your first page, dear Diary, parks are pretty fun.  The weeks coming up are all that's left of the summer I was supposed to have no classes; why not spend them visiting parks?

Many of the parks in North Seattle don't especially welcome visitors.  Most, but not all, such parks are called "Natural Area"s.  I've long used a heuristic to deal with this:  if a water fountain (let alone restroom) can't be found, if no trail leads to it, it probably doesn't exist at all, and certainly doesn't matter. So all I have to do in the Natural Areas and their ilk is follow all the trails.  In reality, I don't expect to find a water fountain in any of these parks.

Anyway, to get back to the question up above, "what's everything?"

I plan to rely on my past lists, plus four sources of information.

The one I've used the longest, going back to May 2020, is the parks department website.  This has individual pages for many parks, most but not all of which are linked to in the official list of all parks.  These pages have symbols for parks with restrooms and water fountains, and these symbols are usually reliable.  No new North Seattle parks were in the official list in July.

Almost as long, back to June 2020, I've used the City of Seattle's real property reports.  These are reports from the city's Real Estate Services office to the chair of the City Council's Finance committee.  The link currently only gets the 2025 and 2026 reports, but at the Internet Archive, the chain goes back to 2013.  The 2013 report begins with explanatory text that suggests to me that it may have been a new thing then, or at least that any previous versions had been forgotten.  These real property reports have two parts, a text introduction, and a spreadsheet.  As now downloadable, all except 2014 and 2018 actually have the intro; all except 2023 and 2026 actually have the spreadsheet, but the 2022 spreadsheet has changes that make its listings hard to correlate with the rest.  The spreadsheet usually lists department, Property Management Area (PMA) number, name, location or address, classification (Fully Utilized, Excess, etc.), current use, and land area; it usually has more columns than that, but what they are varies.  Between 30% and 40% of each spreadsheet is the parks department.

The third source of information, on which I've relied since May 2021 , is OpenStreetMap.  OpenStreetMap is an invaluable resource for many purposes, of course, but specifically for our purposes, dear Diary, it's often just Too Much, and that has probably contributed to my failures to finish my grander projects since getting housed.

Which is why I'm very glad to report the last major source, which has been familiar to me since I started working as a tax preparer in 2007, but which I've barely used for you, dear Diary, before.  The current version of the King County Parcel Viewer offers a map drawn by property lines, and identifies each "parcel"'s owner.  As a result, if what OpenStreetMap presents as green space is really a bunch of private back yards, I can find that out from the parcel viewer.  (The parcel viewer also colours parks green, but only if they're owned by an official parks agency, so, for example, the parks of Seattle Public Utilities aren't coloured.). Each pop-up in the map for a parcel links to assessor's reports, which often include a photo, and tax reports, which go back about 30 years.

What will I do?

Hiking for you, dear Diary, essentially consists of visiting geographical features, in this and most cases parks, and photographing things of interest, usually, in parks, restroom doorways, and water fountains, the former open or held open, the latter in action dispensing water, if all is well.

In Seattle, park restrooms are usually promised to be open 7 am to 7 pm; in reality, because a limited number of staff unlock and lock the doors, the times vary considerably (please refer your readers, dear Diary, to the series "My Book of Hours" in August 2020), but I try to time my visits between 8 am and 6 pm.

In summer, the restrooms are supposed to stay open later, until 9 pm; that was the point of that series, to find out whether the parks department was doing that during the pandemic.  (It wasn't.  So that was something they did differently because of the pandemic, shortening park restroom hours.)  Near as I can tell, now the pandemic is over, 9 pm closings are back. 

Soon after getting housed, I learnt that Blogspot renames the photos I upload, which each of the phones with which I've taken these photos titles with date and time.  So starting with the May 2021 hikes, I made a point of including a daily newspaper in each restroom door shot and in each water fountain action shot.  And also of uploading the photos to my Google Drive the same day.  Theoretically I was also supposed to upload to Google Drive a close-up of the front page, to help in identifying the newspaper in the photos, but I was never very good about that.

Anyway, it turns out that if someone downloads a photo, Blogspot gives it its original name back.  By that time, also, I only uploaded occasional door and fountain shots to Blogspot, and at Google Drive they weren't renamed.  And, to be blunt, I can't afford daily newspapers right now.  So in most photos for these hikes, there's no newspaper.

So that's a change.  Another, probably more important, change is that I'm no longer photographing the doorways of women's restrooms.  That was always socially problematic, and now that the pandemic is over, I just can't see an upside.  I'm trying to at least notice whether the women's rooms are open, but in a recent hike of Green Lake Park, I failed to do that with two out of five restroom pairs.  Back then, I imagined finding a woman to accompany me; now, I see how unlikely that is, but in the event that someone wants equal treatment, she'd have access to a good list, linked above.  (It does, however, omit the composting toilet at Picardo Farm.)

Things that haven't changed:  I try not to photograph people.  I also try not to photograph homes, particularly tents.

So this is as good a place as any to mention what I've been seeing with regard to homeless people.  I've long complained about what the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has done with the federally required point-in-time count.  However, what I've been seeing is that a majority of the parks I've visited have isolated tents, a few have people sleeping rough, a few have obviously inhabited RVs, and a considerable minority have these:

The KCRHA asserts that homelessness has sharply increased around here over the past four years, and however much I doubt their methods, I'm fairly confident, now, that they're right about that.  What I haven't seen yet is the kind of sprawling encampments that were present during the pandemic.

I've long felt uncomfortable with how freely I wrote about such things at the time.  I re-read some of those pages today, and seriously doubt that I actually did wrong, made any homeless people known to those who did them ill.  For example, almost every park encampment I wrote about was in a park with a restroom, which a staffer visited twice daily, and the I-5 encampments, and others remaining, had "sanican"s, which were visited less than daily. The I-5 ones had also already become a political issue.  So this isn't an apology, but is an announcement of another change.  I intend to notice homeless people much less this time.

Which brings us to this part's last main topic:

What will I write?

I recently suggested to you, dear Diary, an ultimate fate of holding a bunch of park-specific pages.  I'm pretty sure most parts of "Under Construction" will be park-specific.

Much though I'd like to make that my norm already, though, it's too much.  I'm increasingly leaning toward being fairer to the downtown parks, and North Seattle alone has over a hundred.  I can't justify adding one or two hundred pages every time I do an everything hike, even though those aren't that common.

So, for example, I currently have a lot of crow to eat concerning Beaver Pond Natural Area.  That'll get its own page.  But the rest of that day's hike near Northgate will be a single part of this page.

My current class isn't over, and won't be until August 26th.  I worked very hard last week to make time for you today, dear Diary, and can't predict when we'll meet again, but surely not later than August 27th.  Until then, happy days and happy nights. 

An Update to "A Sweep"

Dear Diary,

Well, I may have survived what indeed proved to be an infection with COVID-19 - if I had to guess, with the omicron variant.  In any event, I didn't work on any of your at-home pages, dear Diary, while sick, so still have them all to do.  But now that I've returned to work, I have an update for you on the rocks whose quiet retirement some of my former peers were so rude as to disrupt for the sake of something so trivial as shelter.

Yes, that's right, those rocks are now protected from human beings by a fence!  Isn't Seattle a wonderfully kind and compassionate city?

Unfortunately, the fence is only temporary, even by humans' standards, let alone rocks'.  So I'm not at all sure these rocks will be protected long term from those so wicked as to want protection from the weather.

All for now, dear Diary.  I hope soon, though, finally to tell you about Lezlie Lowe's book No Place to Go.  Until then, a good night and good days.

Away from the Manger

Dear Diary,

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verse 7, we read:  "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."  This was because she (Mary) and her husband Joseph had traveled from their actual home in Nazareth to Bethlehem.

Jesus Christ, in other words, according to Luke (no other Gospel mentions these elements) was born similar to the veteran mentioned in part I of the previous page of this series - homeless by situation, but not by way of life.

There are not a lot of mangers in Seattle.  And there's a great deal more rain than there is in Nazareth and Bethlehem.  So much so, in fact, that the main issue for survival outside here is protection from rain, though cold, heat, and other circumstances can also kill.

The first page of this series was not just a brief, ironic news report.  It was also meant as a demonstration that the city is serious about keeping homeless people from using tents or vehicles to protect themselves from the rain.  Both tents and vehicles are useful, in Seattle, mainly on public property - parks or sidewalks, for tents; streets, for vehicles.  And even inconsequential public property like the rocks south of S King St under I-5 is now off limits.

Tents and vehicles have two other important traits, as shelter for the homeless, in comparison to their main competitors, sleeping bags and indoor shelters.  First, they enable the accumulation of property.  Second, they're very visible.

Now, it would be entirely cynical to think the city's leaders object to tents and vehicles because they're visible.  So I must conclude that the objection is that they allow homeless people to accumulate property.   Presumably the homeless are actually the sacrificial goats - look, more Bible! - of the capitalist system, the ones forbidden to accumulate the way everyone else is encouraged to.  How someone like me, or my best homeless friend, with paid storage, fits in, I couldn't speculate.

In any event, the second page of this series was not just an endless, loquacious, self-indulgent recounting of my memories.  It was also a demonstration of a couple of facts.  First, there probably aren't enough private non-housing doorways in Seattle for all the unsheltered homeless.  I ended up two miles from the place I spent my days.  Second, faced with enough homeless people, commercial land-owners will not tolerate them.  In Laurelhurst, I and my few peers were accepted.  In the U-District, the parts of it I lived in anyhow, we at least weren't interfered with much.  But on Capitol Hill, miles of fencing have been erected with the simple goal of keeping homeless people out in the rain.

Let's look at that phrase:  homeless people.  All of the homeless are members of a particular species, Homo sapiens.  And while we who belong to this species like to compliment ourselves on how diverse we are, we do have some things in common.

Most humans are adaptible.

Most humans are resourceful.

Most humans wish to survive.

I hear your readers objecting, dear Diary:  "But what about drug addicts?  The mentally ill?  The incompetent?"

And in fact, I'm pretty sure all three categories are over-represented among the homeless.  But I am evidence that the mentally ill can be adaptible, resourceful, and wish to survive.  I've met addicts who were the same way.

I'm also a relatively passive man, which is a more serious impediment, and one I'm not sure is actually over-represented among the homeless.

So what's my point?

I took the light rail a bunch this weekend, re-visiting the doorways I chose to sleep in on the basis of how dry they were.  I was awed by the size of those dry subway platforms.

There are many churches in town with dry naves.

If homeless people are in fact people, then sooner or later they'll notice these facts too.  Then what?

There are also many residential porches in Seattle.  The building I'm writing from has one.  Are the city's leaders really determined to make homeless people turn to these?  I gave an example, in part II of the second page of this series, of campers in a private home's doorway.  Don't assume it can't happen again.

Most humans can collaborate.  Homeless people famously can't - the sociological term is "disaffiliation".  But if during this cold, wet winter collaboration is the only way to survive, the sociologists may find themselves surprised.  It's happened here before, hasn't it?  "Nickelsville", that's called.

What will it be, city leaders?  Would you rather see thousands of unsheltered homeless people die in the rain, or work together against you, or metastasise throughout the city, or will you walk the city back from the precipice you're hurtling towards?

Good night, dear Diary.  I make no predictions as to when or what the next page will be, but I'm not forgetting you.

A Sweep

Dear Diary,

Over the past couple of weeks, some rocks have been made safe.

I've been taking S King St as my main route from the International District-Chinatown station of the light rail to my work, and back again, since late September.  This means I've been walking between the halves of a pretty large encampment for months.  The northern half were camping on a berm between a parking lot and the sidewalk, but the southern half, across the street, were camping on those rocks and others like them, which must have suffered terribly.

On the morning of Tuesday, December 7, there was a big gap in the southern encampment.  I spoke briefly with a resident, and at greater length with an outreach worker, but since I didn't tell her about you, dear Diary, I'm not going to quote her.  I will, however, say that publicity, to the effect that what was going on at that place at that time was a newfangled kind of sweep in which desirable alternatives are offered the campers, seems to have been substantially correct.

By the evening of Thursday, December 9, there were a dozen tents left.  They remained there for several days, so I think the newfangled kind of sweep had by then concluded.  Some of the people using those dozen tents had probably been there already, and resisted their options; others had probably arrived too late to get those options.

On one of too many days when I've reached work really late these past weeks, Monday or Tuesday, the 13th or 14th, I saw a garbage truck pulled up, being fed, as I walked past, a blanket, which seemed likely to be followed by the tent it had come from.  I didn't take any photos and certainly don't know whether the tent had still been in use, or was known to have been abandoned by a since-housed person.  I saw a Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation truck there at the time; since parks department employees are now again those the city calls upon to physically perform sweeps, it seems reasonable to assume at least some of those involved were sweepers of that kind.

I saw notices on the morning of Wednesday, the 15th:

The notice is dated December 14, and announces a sweep as of December 16.  At one time there was a legal requirement of three days' notice for non-emergency sweeps.  Obviously, this requirement wasn't met in this case.  The magic words that turn this sweep into an emergency one are right at the start of the notice:

"Materials in this area are an obstruction of the intended use of this property, are in a hazardous location or present a hazard."

Now, I'm a little perplexed.  What is the "intended use" of a half-acre or so of rocks in an underpass?  Or even of a berm outside the fence of a parking lot?  We'll come back to this question.

What about "in a hazardous location" ?  Well, maybe if the campers were barefoot; I didn't take my shoes off to test whether the rocks are sharp.

But "present a hazard".  This leads back to the issue I raised in a recent part of my series of appreciations of the parks of Seattle's downtown.  All of the campers there were criminals.  They were trespassing, after all, like, ultimately, all homeless people.  In addition, any number of them lit fires, though from what I saw mainly for cooking purposes rather than for warmth, but all surely illegal.  Well, homeless criminals must be assumed to be desperate and daring characters, ready to eat babies at a moment's notice, and therefore everywhere they sleep presents a hazard.  Which is why almost none of the sweeps done since mayor Jenny Durkan took office have obeyed the three days' notice rule.

Anyway, here's another shot of the rocks, and to be fair, two of the berm.

I usually walk on the south side, and here are the uses of the rocky area I've observed since the 16th.

Twice, I've seen a young couple at the back of them.  Once sitting side by side, once entwined (though still fully clothed).

Once, I saw some guys standing around - my guess would be, construction workers (Marpac Construction is nearby) on a smoke break.  One of them, seeing me put food in my mouth, amused himself by asking how I was doing, then answering the reply question I hadn't asked, "Fine, thanks."  This is the only time I've been harassed in any way by people in that rocky area.

And tonight I saw someone in a wheelchair, also at the back, not especially close to the couple.

I find it hard to believe that any of these are the rocks' intended uses.

So I've concluded that the intended use of that area is as a sort of retirement home for rocks.  A place where they can be mostly free of human intervention.  A place grievously violated by those inconsiderate campers.

As Christmas approaches, it's good to know that the city cares so much about the welfare of rocks that it's willing to sacrifice the welfare of humans.  That shows a very unusual kind of heart, doubtless worth treasuring.

I hope tomorrow night to tell you further reflections on these topics, dear Diary, and have little doubt that on Christmas Day itself I'll draw my conclusions.  Until then, a good night and good day.

More on Amazon's South of Denny Parks

Dear Diary,

Surprise!  I went hiking this evening, which cascaded into doing a bunch of chores late, so in the end all my writing in you tonight will not only eat into quiet time, but also into my sleep.  Sorry, but this is bad news for me.

Anyway. the point of these hikes was threefold:  I wanted to try to get a photo of Amazon's "Day 1 Field" (if that's really what anyone outside Open Street Map calls it); I wanted to photograph the seventeenth place that I hadn't visited yesterday, which I now have no hope of telling you about tonight; and I wanted to photograph a park I do still hope to tell you about tonight, of which, it turned out, I didn't have remotely as many months-old photos as I'd thought.

Well, the see-saws were considerably less popular than yesterday, so I did manage to get a photo:

And by the way, I'm now pretty sure "Day 1 Field"'s turf is artificial.

Anyway, walking away from there, I decided to explore the parkish area I'd mentioned on the other side of 7th Ave, between Blanchard and Bell Streets.  This turned out to be rather bigger than Open Street Map had led me to believe, and also turned out definitely to be a separate Amazon park from the one I wrote about yesterday (and above).  For one thing, it has its own dog off-leash area, as postage-stamp-sized as the one in that park.  For another, it has signs I didn't notice in that other park:

In case the print is too fine for you, dear Diary, what they say, in essence, is that behaviour in general, and political behaviour in particular, in this park is OK as long as it doesn't "unreasonably interfere" with others, and in particular with whatever Amazon employees need to do.  This got my attention because so many businesses explicitly bar signature gathering, my usual Safeway of not long ago closed early one day for fear of a protest march ...  I'm aware that there are many reasons to doubt Amazon's fundamental morality, and have voiced some myself in my years-ago AMA on Reddit.  But if we don't notice when businesses of any kind behave better than the norm, what incentive do they have to do so?  And these signs amount to Amazon, of all companies, behaving better than the norm.  So, um, one cheer, anyway, for Amazon.

(And at least a half-cheer more for one implication of that sign:  The sheltered parts of this park, that led me to misjudge its size on Open Street Map - would they really be OK for homeless people to sleep in?  I'll have to come later some night and see.  Mind, I do mean sleep, as in sleeping bags, rolled back up in the morning; tents would obviously "interfere".)

In the background of the photo nearer above is the dullest of the interactive electronic artworks I've encountered at the three Amazon parks I've visited in the past two days, which it seems obviously to have laid on for the holidays.  The one described yesterday, the see-saw, really does seem to deserve the enthusiasm with which people greet it.   The one in the park I still hope to describe tonight, um, doesn't, but it's still interactive in principle.  For this politically semi-free park kitty-corner from the one next to the Spheres, though, Amazon got big glowing pseudo-icicles that change colours, to produce a "kaleidoscopic" effect.  Well, maybe by daylight, of which we have so very much in Seattle in December.  I didn't notice anything of the sort by the rather bright artificial light of night-time.  So OK, now I'm stuck, having photographed the thing, with going back and getting the artist's or artists' name(s) and the title, but anyway, at night, it's dull.  Whereas the see-saws' population tripled just while I was trying to set up to take a photo, which is why the one up top isn't as panoramic as it could've been thirty seconds earlier.

These results from visiting two Amazon between-buildings parklets lead me to think that the third, bounded by 7th and 8th Avenues and Blanchard and Lenora Streets, would probably be worth seeing up closer than the across-the-street view I got yesterday.  Maybe when I go back for the prism artist name(s).

Anyway, it's time to get on with the parks of the central group, which will probably take me, alas, a while to write about.  Until then, dear Diary, happy minutes.

Gilman Playground and Woodland and Green Lake Parks Tonight

Dear Diary,

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

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

Gilman Playground

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

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

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

Woodland Park

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

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

So, um, I was pretty unprepared for this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Lake Park

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

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

Ho ho ho!  Happy Christmas!

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

SDOT seems determined to play the Grinch this year.

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

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

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

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

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.

A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part I

Dear Diary,

From Licorice Fern Natural Area on NE 130th St, I went south to NE 125th St, and then east.  My first stop was the only Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park in North Seattle that I knew about but didn't visit last year.

Map:

Thornton Creek Addition

Google Maps is quite sure where this park's address - 2318 NE 125th St - is, and who's there:  the Food Distribution Center of Greater Seattle Cares.  Actually, as Google Search knows, that center's address is 2212 NE 125th St.  Google Maps doesn't have a clue who's at 2212, but knows it's the address of, well, this park.  Whatever.

Google Search is right, and Google Maps is wrong.

Although if the food distribution people were never here, I don't know why I found three abandoned shopping carts on the premises.

Regardless, the parks department didn't want this property for its building, which according to Redfin is a 3-bedroom house prone to flooding.  Rather, for its frontage on the North Fork of Thornton Creek:

Of course, it also comes with a lawn.

I hope they don't just tear down the building - if nothing else, it contains three restrooms - and kind of hope, given that Lake City is pretty under-parked, they don't turn this nearly-an-acre site into Yet Another Thornton Creek Natural Area.  But they only bought it in 2019; time will tell.

Virgil Flaim Park

The parks department website comes through again.  Virgil Flaim was a Lake City resident who ran the Lake City Community Center for twenty years.  I don't know when the community centers became parks department properties, so don't know whether he was a department employee, but anyway, good for them for naming this park for him.

Since I've shown you pictures of this park before, dear Diary, I didn't worry too much about taking more this time; also, it was fairly crowded.  It has a water fountain, which is running:

and I took a couple of pictures of the greensward to show that there isn't a restroom being built there yet:

Albert Davis Park

The parks department website gives Davis, who definitely wasn't an employee, a long paragraph as a Lake City civic leader.

This park was the site of an encampment from before I first saw it last May (when the campers appeared to me mostly black), on through January (when they were considerably more mixed in race), to Thursday, May 6, one week ago, when it was swept largely in response to incidents the previous Thursday (and Friday).  Two people were shot (but survived), one of them in his RV adjacent to the camp, the other at an unrevealed location; if the identity or identities of the shooter or shooters is or are known, it's news to me.  But the Friday incident was a fire sparked by propane use at the park itself, which makes associating it with the park rather more obvious.

Seattle has a pattern that I doubt is unique to it, but that I've observed more here than elsewhere perhaps because I've been homeless so long here.  That is, some location gets associated with a lot of issues - violence, fires, drug dealers, prostitution, loud arguments, litter, you name it.  The city responds by, essentially, blaming the location.  What I don't understand is why city leaders, who ought to be wiser than I am, can't grasp that some poor people have a lot of issues.  If they don't want such people's places to become problematic, they shouldn't concentrate those people in one place; but because nobody wants poor neighbours, for precisely this reason, and also because they can't pay for one-acre lots, poor people get concentrated.  And so in location after location, Something Must Be Done, or at least Shoved Off To Somewhere Else.  The problem of sweeps is by no means limited to the homeless.  The SRO I lived in for nearly six years is closed to this day because faulty wiring caused a fire over five years ago.  (Though an employee told me it was because an alcoholic fell asleep while smoking.)  The building appears to be fine (the fire was after I was evicted, so I'm only going by what I see from outside), but nearly forty housing units are lost.  And then there's the Everspring Inn, to coverage of whose closure (initiated by the Seattle Police Department) I've put links into you before, dear Diary, but here are some more:  Crosscut, The Seattle Times.  Even if all the homeless were shot down tomorrow, this pattern would persist, and because of it, there would be more homeless soon enough.

Anyway, there are two important differences between park sweeps conducted by the Navigation Team and those conducted by the parks department.  The parks department has consistently been giving notice, and it gets the places it sweeps clean.  These are not unconnected:  if notice is given, the sweeps have fewer campers to deal with, and less difficulty making the distinction between valuable property and trash, a distinction homeless people are always going to make differently from how housed city employees do.

But that cleanliness meant that for the first time, I could take pictures in Albert Davis Park, so that's what I did.  Only not in the park, because after I'd walked across it, I found this sign:

It took a deal of work to photograph the fine print there at the lower right corner, but I did it:

So I only took pictures from the sidewalk outside the park.

In all the excitement, I completely forgot this park's water fountain, so I came back Wednesday, and hope to tell you, dear Diary, about that tomorrow.  Today I still have a lot to tell and show you, starting with the rest of the block Albert Davis Park is in.

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.

A Hike Near the I-5 Bridge

Dear Diary,

This page is sort of an example of a bait-and-switch.  I told you last night that I visited five city properties near I-5 yesterday.  First of all, this wasn't quite true.  I found out when starting to write this page that I'd skipped one, so I went back and looked at it last night.  It's photogenic, and visible to the public; but it has no door that opens to the public, let alone restrooms or water fountains that do, it has no trees or homeless people, and it's part of our infrastructure.

I also didn't find one, a sewer property.  Seattle Public Utilities builds some extremely parklike areas (we'll get to one in the next page), but also lists some things in the real property report that just can't be seen at all.

And one was really boring.  Just to establish that I can be trusted on this subject, I'll tell you about it this time and show you a picture, dear Diary, but in general, I intend to skip such sites.

So that's three of the five that this page will show photos of.  Let's get started.

EDIT 5/11:  Map:

Snippet at 398 NE 40th St

I'm already finding that most of the properties listed as "snippet"s, used for "landscaping", aren't really findable.  This one is supposed to be 658 square feet near the corner of 4th Ave NE and NE 40th St.  I thought there were two candidates, and took pictures of both.  Google Maps claims to know which of the two it is, but I suspect it's lying about knowing, and I think the other more probable.

In general, then, I'll skip the "snippet"s, but as it happens, both of these candidates are parklike and photogenic, so here's my candidate:

There's a building at the corner whose street number is on 4th Ave NE, and there's a building to the left, but between that building's garage and the other building's landscaping there's an area with different vegetation, and no building, but tall trees, behind it.  I think it's probably around the right size, and it's in the right place.

However, NE 40th St is divided there by a steep slope (crossing the divider involves stairs), and the other possibility is that this property represents part of the median.  It can't represent all of it, because that median is considerably more than 658 square feet, but anyway, here's Google Maps's candidate:

From there I went south.

University Satellite Yard

This is a surplus Seattle City Light property at 3814 4th Ave NE.  When I compiled my first list in January, I focused on "vacant", "underutilized", and "difficult building site" properties in particular, because I couldn't help wondering why they weren't used to house homeless people.  Well, um, ...

Now, if one looks up Nickelsville Northlake, one finds that they got a reprieve, and are due to move out in June.  Hence:

But if one looks more closely, it turns out that that was June of 2020.  I have no idea whether this tiny house village - no, not a tent city - now has a scheduled move date or not.  Here's their website for what more information it offers.

Anyway, though, I should've had more faith in the city this time.

SDOT Parking and Landscape Area

Part of the parking lot east of Ivar's is actually city property.  It's a fairly large property by real property report standards, and it does include a bit of landscaping, but it really isn't very interesting.  I intend to leave most such things out going forward, but figured this page would be a bit less of a bait and switch if I left it in as an example of what I consider boring.

While trying to figure out which property was meant, I went as far east as North Passage Point and as far west as the Latona Ave Street End.

OK, that's it for this part of the hike.  I then trudged west a ways for the next "another" hike, which I'll describe after I have breakfast.  Until then, dear Diary.