Counties of Western Washington, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

Part of the reason I indicated the nearest restrooms to so many places in the nearly-finished "Library Hours Six Months Later" series is that I wanted to figure out how far each place for which I did that was from those restrooms.  I remembered (badly) a quote I read early in the pandemic:  Alison Eisinger saying her organisation, the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, recommended "everybody in the city be within a half a mile or less of a working toilet and a way to wash their hands".  (From "Seattle will reopen 5 library bathrooms during coronavirus pandemic", by Sydney Brownstone and Daniel Beekman, April 21, 2020.)  I wanted to see not just how well that held up in Seattle, but in general.

But then I thought of another approach that might be easier and would certainly be more entertaining.  Why not just examine and map the public restroom situation in each of the nineteen counties the library hours series covered?  As with the libraries, this would be essentially a desk activity, rather than a hiking one.  (And I'm really not up to hiking right now, being sick.)

Of course, King County, the only one in Washington in which I've lived, and the one that includes Seattle, your titular concern, dear Diary, is the most urgent of the nineteen from my perspective, and since it's much the most populous, probably from the most perspectives too.  But King County is a huge and complex place.  It's physically the second largest county in western Washington (though Okanogan County in eastern Washington is about twice as big), it has by far the most munipalities, to say nothing of additional districts relevant to the topic...  Not a good starting point.

I also remembered the failed series on Tacoma, and how important population density is with regard to the density of things like public restrooms.  So I decided I would figure out the raw population density of each county, and then, since King County is about twice as densely populated as the next in line, I'd start with the least densely populated.

I'm finishing up that county now, and hope to tell you about it within a few days, dear Diary.  But it's shown me that I can always count on projects I think of as fun to get bigger as I proceed with them.  So I thought I should tell you what I intend to do with each part.

Where this starts is that much of western Washington (28.6%, page numbered 8 of 28-page PDF) is federal land, and this is by no means equally distributed county by county.  This makes even population density an unreliable number.  That least densely populated county is probably much nearer the middle of the pack if I only count acreage not owned by the state or the nation.  But, see, that county's government has an incentive to publicise this fact; I'm not sure I can get such convenient numbers for every county.  And quite a few other counties, actually including King County, have vast tracts of federal or state land.

So I've allowed my interest in geography and history to contribute.  Things I've now researched for County A, and see no reason not to research for the rest:

Parks, of course, and libraries.

Airports.  (Because I don't know whether publicly owned airports have public restrooms.  County A, however, doesn't have any publicly owned airports.)

Schools, post offices and election turnout.  (Because of what they show about geography.)

Election results.  (Because, hey, who isn't interested in politics?)

Rivers.  (Because mapping at the county level with my resources is annoyingly hard, and the rivers can help.)

Government maps.  (Because I used to be a geography major.)

Settlements.  (I'd never appreciated before just how nebulous the concept of an unincorporated settlement can be.  Much more on this below.)

Park restrooms.  (Not just locally owned parks, mind.)

Transportation.  (Because I still want to know whether I can walk to Bellingham, but want to know alternatives in case I'm not equal to it.)

Cell phone coverage.

Private amenities like churches and supermarkets.

So I was right to start with an easier county.  This is turning into an enjoyably obsessive, but fairly huge, job.

Three things need more attention.

1. Maps and grids

Once upon a time, dear Diary, maps often had grids, usually showing latitude and longitude.  (A grid based on latitude and longitude is called a "graticule".)  This enabled people using the maps to do a couple of basic things:  identify a location with a couple of numbers; and make maps of their own.  But a lot of map users don't care about either of those things.  As far back as the 1980s, companies had started producing "atlases" whose maps omitted the graticule - here's looking at you, Dorling-Kindersley! - and by the 2000s, the majority of "atlases" published omitted it.  Nevertheless, the graticule was still considered conventional enough that both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, which both, Wikipedia says, started in 2004, have offered ways to show it.  But now they don't.

Graticules can, of course, be carried much further down than they usually are on atlas maps.  I've owned maps whose grids represent minutes of latitude and longitude.  But in the majority of the US, it's also possible to use a different grid, whose ultimate unit is the mile, but which is much less regular.  This is the surveyors' grid on which descriptions of land title are based.

This grid starts with the section, which usually is one mile north to south and one mile east to west.  Sections have numbers which usually show their place within a township of 36 square miles.  (My home state of Wisconsin assigns governmental powers to this kind of township, but Washington doesn't.)  The numbering system is consistent, so the corners of a township are sections 1 (northeast), 6 (northwest), 31 (southwest), and 36 (southeast); some maps show numbers in only those squares, which is enough to identify that this is the kind of grid being shown.

Townships are located by four references:  A local meridian (north-south line) and base (east-west line), a range (how many townships from the meridian), and, um, this is stupid but it's never going to change because it's built into too many aspects of American life, a township (how many of the other kind of township from the base).  Usually people don't talk much about the 36-square-mile kind of township in Washington, and usually the other kind shows up like this:  T8N, R6E, S26 W.M.  (Where W.M., Willamette Meridian, implies also the Willamette Base Line.)

Because County A turns out to have so many federal and state lands in it, which Open Street Map quite simply doesn't handle all that well, I've turned instead to government maps that do a better job (and as an added advantage have sectional grids).  However, I expect to go back to OSM later on, in more settled counties.

Anyway, as a by-product of using US Geological Survey topographical maps, I re-learned this system, and adopted it.  It turns out Open Street Map allows downloads at a scale of one inch per mile up to about 220 sections.  So I've divided my maps, and County A, into nine regions of three townships by two ranges, which I originally meant to cover from Open Street Map.  Obviously, to the extent that I go back to OSM, I'll stick with this way of dividing counties up, though the exact shape of the divisions will probably vary.

2. Toilets and drinking water

It turns out that national and state parks and similar things often have something called a vault toilet.  (No, dear Diary, I did not know what that was either, until I started looking.  It's basically an outhouse except that it's designed to be emptied periodically like a "sanican", keeping human excretions separated from the surrounding area, which explains the purpose of building them in huge areas of land that's supposed to be somewhat conserved.)  Wikipedia has a long list of other things that can be considered forms of toilets; in County A's national lands, the composting toilet, which we've already encountered, dear Diary, in North Seattle's Picardo Farm, also appears in a few places.

Furthermore, looking closely at national and state parks has reminded me of childhood camping trips in Wisconsin parks (to be exact, one National Forest and one Wisconsin State Park), in which potable water usually came from pumps.  The agencies I'm looking at don't talk about their sources of drinking water the way they do about their toilets, but I bet when I call they'll say that most of them are pumps.  Now, nothing requires that we use potable water to wash our hands, but since the difference between potable and non-potable water can be understood as one of cleanness, and much of the point of washing hands is to get them clean enough to, for example, eat or touch our faces with, I'm not at all sure alternatives make much sense.  It's, um, relatively hard for a person alone to wash hands using a pump; how hard depends on how long that person wants to wash and how long the pump runs (if at all) after the person stops pumping it.

English Wikipedia doesn't seem to have even a footer, let alone an actual page, listing other forms sources of potable water can take.  (Though its articles "Pump" and "Drinking fountain" list lots of specific kinds of each.)  But one thing I've heard often enough to have some confidence in it is that running water is much safer than still water; given a choice, when drinking water in the wild (or for that matter getting cooking water), go for the river or creek rather than the lake.  Sadly, in North Seattle we don't have any rivers, and the surviving creeks are rather more still than running much of the year.  County A's creeks may be different, but even there, the most important agency strongly recommends boiling any water one drinks from the wild.

In County A, sources of potable water are much less common than vault toilets.  This strikes me as unnatural, since the first place where I really looked at this sort of thing was North Seattle, where the opposite is true.  On the other hand, Tacoma is the same way as County A, so I should probably just get over my prejudices.

Concretely, then, my maps of County A, and eventually, should I live so long (and retain map-making tools so long), of King County, need to account for multiple forms of what I've hitherto treated as more or less unitary categories.

3. Settlement types

Remember townships, dear Diary?  In the other states in which I've lived, Wisconsin and Illinois, these have governmental purposes.  As a result, those states' geography is relatively clearcut.  The townships aren't necessarily incorporated, so that's like Washington, but it's easy to specify where an unincorporated place is - "Oh, that's in the Town of Oconomowoc" - and the Census Bureau's choice of reporting areas becomes more predictable.  In County A I've more or less had to figure out my own methods.

I'd fumbled around for a while when I noticed something in the main map I used for County A:  At its highest magnification, the one that numbers all the sections in each 36-section township, it also shows a lot of small dots, and they seem to cluster around settlements.  I eventually concluded that those dots actually represent buildings, not people or residences.  At any rate, I then went over all of County A carefully noting which 36-section townships had dots, and how many and where.

(Unfortunately, the same map doesn't do this for other counties.  I guess the makers thought they could handle County A precisely because it really is pretty sparsely populated.)

I then went to Google Maps and got the satellite view, and looked at each of those dot locations.  (This is when I gave up the idea that the dots meant people.)  And largely on that basis, I classified the settlements of County A.

This classification has three criteria:

1. Official recognition.  Washington has two categories of incorporation, cities and towns.  (There aren't many towns.)  But there are other forms of official recognition.  In County A, there are two official cities, but the Census Bureau has also "designated" one "place".  Post offices are another form of official recognition; County A has four, one each in the Census Bureau's three plus one more.  This more or less merges into the next ground.
   
2. Centrality.  As you know, dear Diary, I used to be a geography major, and one thing that has stuck with me from that is the idea of Central Place Theory.  It hasn't stuck with me entirely favourably - I also remember some anthropological archæologists who took it as entirely too reliable a guide in their own work. [1]  But I agree with the basic idea that cities are central places because they offer things people are willing to travel for.  (For this purpose, the advertising built into Google Maps is actually extremely helpful, but for County A I also looked at a lot of other official and unofficial lists.)
   
3. Population density.  The parts of County A that aren't parks include a lot of roads, but in many cases what adjoins those roads is farms or surviving forest.  My eventual conclusion was that what I consider "dense housing" for this project's purposes is very much less than urbanists want:  here, dense housing means that houses are separated by streets (if that much) rather than by fields.

I ended up with, in County A, five settlement types.  Given that I have three criteria and don't quantify any of them, the dividing lines aren't entirely clear, but I think these capture what I'm interested in.

[1] The guy whose page I linked to invented a test that was widely adopted but that I think is blatantly too mechanical to work.  See, Central Place Theory is fundamentally hierarchical.  So what this guy did was say that the classifications of societies used by anthropologists could be detected archæologically by their settlement hierarchies.  Societies without a hierarchy were bands.  Societies with a two-level hierarchy were tribes.  Societies with a three-level hierarchy were chiefdoms, and societies with a four-level hierarchy were states.  I assume this means that Singapore has a four-level settlement hierarchy, but I sure don't know where it found room for that.

Cities

A city, in this scheme, scores high on all three criteria:  it gets a significant amount of official recognition, it offers a number of central services, and a significant chunk of its housing is dense housing.  County A has three of these, but one (despite being an official Washington city) is pretty close to the next category.

Suburbs

A suburb, in this scheme, gets some official recognition, may have a few central services, but has some dense housing.  It also has to be possible to get from a suburb to a city without going through clearly rural areas like farms or forests along the way.  (This is why that official Washington city isn't a suburb.)  County A has two suburbs.  I don't expect, in later counties, to change my opinion concerning settlements that, like that official city, meet the base criteria but not the continuity criterion, so haven't figured out yet what I'll do if some place convinces me to do so.  I do expect, in later counties, to classify some official Washington cities that do meet the continuity criterion as suburbs.

Hamlets

An isolated place that has a little dense housing but not much of anything else, I consider a hamlet.  County A has three of these.

Villages

A village is the opposite of a suburb:  it has a reasonable level of centrality, but not so much dense housing.  (It also usually has a little governmental recognition.)  County A has five of these.

Rural centres

I think there must be a better name for this kind of thing, but haven't found it; this is my work-around.  A rural centre is the opposite of a hamlet:  it has zero dense housing, but a little centrality.  County A has one of these, plus a set of three so close together they might as well count as one.

Conclusion

I don't know how soon I can tell you about County A, dear Diary.  First, it's Christmas time, so I don't know how soon the e-mails I haven't yet sent and phone calls I haven't yet made might be answered.  Second, I have a lot on my plate.  My landlord seems to think he can make me homeless again at the end of this month - I'd thought, given the winter eviction ban, I had until March, but if I squint really hard I can see why he might think that, which might affect his decisions even if he's wrong.  My storage unit is due for auction tomorrow.  I'm sick.  I'm actively job-hunting.  And whether I become homeless or get a job, either way, that'll seriously bite into my time.  But County A is, at this point, the county I'm most certain I can do.  We'll just have to see about the others.

Once I get better, whether or not I'm homeless by then, I do expect to start checking the North Seattle park restrooms, too.  And although I am, in fact, right now treating the private academic libraries as a lower priority, come January that'll change.  Finally, although it's much more fun to study County A than to write about what I've already studied in downtown Seattle, that remains to do, and if I do become homeless again in January (especially if I also lose my storage unit by then), that's sure to put me in the right frame of mind for the writing.

So I don't know at this point whether you'll hear from me before January, but probably not long after New Year's.  Until then, dear Diary, happy days and nights, happy Christmas, and happy New Year's.

Bellevue's Downtown Park and News from the University District

Dear Diary,

I lied to you a little bit in splitting up the two pages I'm writing today.  In reality, I'd gotten very confused about downtown Bellevue's geography the night I saw Avatar, and came away thinking Open Street Map had made up fountain c out of whole cloth (because I'd looked at the wrong intersection) and thinking Bellevue Downtown Park (a specific park in downtown Bellevue, that is) had lots of water fountains.  It doesn't, actually, have six of them, as I came away thinking, but does have four, which is more than any park in North Seattle except Woodland and Green Lake parks.  So my point is that yesterday, Downtown Park was part of my planned itinerary, not just a stop on my way home as I implied this morning.  So here goes.

Bellevue Downtown Park

This park is pretty much the pride and joy of Bellevue's Department of Parks & Community Services.  So please excuse me, dear Diary, in a bit of park appreciation before getting to its water fountains.

Part of what confused me Monday night is that the only map the department makes available of the whole park, in the park, is one that explains in great detail that half of what it shows is future plans:

(Nor do I see a more present-focused map offered at the department's page about Downtown Park.)

So it was easy for me to figure that every time I got something wrong, it was because the map was ahead of its time.  The original reason I was going to split the pages I'm writing today was that I was going to fulminate about Open Street Map assuming a map of a future park was good enough for their current map.  Stupid me, no, Open Street Map was quite right in most particulars.  I ended up splitting it anyway, partly to give Downtown Park more prominence and partly because this page is photo-heavy.

Anyway, though, the core of the park is a circular (I assume) promenade, whose pavement is covered with sand or small gravel.  Most of the time, what's inside the circle is grass, but there's water flowing between the grass and the promenade the whole way:

And for the quarter-circle nearest the playground, the grass largely goes away, and they've set up a waterfall, much delighting the ducks as well as the children:

Oh, yes, playground.  If one does a search for ' "water fountains" "downtown Bellevue" ', most of the results don't allude to the broken street fountains at all, they're about either Downtown Park or Inspiration Playground, which has a map that doesn't try to instill doubt by referring to future plans:

And that map shows - I know this will be difficult for you to believe, dear Diary, of a park named Downtown:

Yes, they built restrooms not only adjacent to, but difficult to approach except through, the playground!  Those restrooms were also open Monday night, after 9 P.M.; Seattle's park restrooms close at 7 P.M. in October.

And yes, they have a restroom specifically designed for toddlers, too.

I'm worried about running up against Blogspot photo limits, so won't show you all the water fountains, dear Diary, but they're in the following places:  the northeast corner of the park, where one enters from Bellevue Way NE and NE 4th St; the northernmost point above the promenade, where Open Street Map currently shows one, but at street level not promenade level; next to the restrooms (a three-bowl water fountain, one of which overshot its bowl Monday night but had been fixed by yesterday), also shown by Open Street Map; and, um, 

one at the promenade's southernmost point that, unlike all the rest, flows only weakly, making it hard to drink from.

Anyway, can you believe it, dear Diary?  A downtown park with restrooms open after 9 P.M.?

The way home

Well, anyway, after that it was back to Seattle for me, but a very long hike.  I was very amused by a sign I saw at the last, or first, exits from the 520 Trail:

At least one town hereabouts agrees with me and Lezlie Lowe that public restrooms are a good thing to have around, not a bad one.

Anyway, once I was finally back on dry land, I decided to get to Ravenna Boulevard by way of Brooklyn Ave, figuring it would be less crowded.  Not very far north, this caught my eye:

Sound Transit is planning to build a barren windswept plaza, but apparently make it a little less windswept by planting some trees around it.  Um, one cheer for Sound Transit?

Further north...  Dear Diary, as I write up last week's hikes downtown, I'm going to be complimenting rapid construction being done by private enterprise.  Well, not all private enterprise is quite so efficient.  It's been years, guys.

Still further north, something caught my eye by not being there:

I thought University Heights, the building, was city-owned, but it isn't in either the 2020 or the 2022 real property report, so I thought wrong, and I should stop kvetching about their restrooms not being public.  But the plaza is a Seattle park, University Heights Plaza.  And in that park, during the pandemic, there were several "sanican"s and a hand-washing station.  Not any more.

I figured maybe the "sanican"s had been relocated, so I circled U-Heights, in the process coming upon the original Seattle Street Sink, another pandemic innovation.  This must be on land owned by U-Heights rather than the parks, since the then-mayor made it clear that she considered street sinks utterly illegal:

For what I think is the first time since I first saw it there, I tried it yesterday night, and to my amazement it was still running:

So, um, two cheers for U-Heights?

Anyway, dear Diary, that was yesterday's hike.  I'm about to write a third page, but then it might be a little while before you hear from me again.  Happy days and nights until then.

Two Downtowns and Two Malls

Dear Diary,

On Monday I finally got to watch a movie my cousin had worked on, in the way I wanted to watch it.  I didn't find his name in the credits; they went by too fast, so I'll probably have to look on a DVD to say I've seen him listed.  But anyway.

I had some errands to run first.  One of them should've been on Capitol Hill, but ended up taking me downtown, where the others were anyway; the upshot was that I was in Bellevue in the evening instead of the afternoon.  But while I was in downtown Seattle, I found a street fountain I'd found before and forgotten about, which isn't on Seattle Public Utilities' list.

R. [595 Pine St]

I hadn't bought a newspaper - none of my plans for the day involved finding water fountains or restrooms, and although it was a splurge to go to the movie in the first place, I don't splurge quite so thoroughly as to buy something I normally can't afford just because I'm splurging.  I also forgot to take a location shot.  But this water fountain is at the southwest corner of 6th Ave and Pine St, and was running strongly Monday afternoon:

and giving good water.  (I expected trouble at the theatre over satchels, so didn't even bring a bottle, let alone food, for the journey.  Pretty soon I'll tell you, dear Diary, about another water fountain I drank copiously from Monday afternoon.)

On my way from the Bellevue Transit Center to the cinema, I found another street fountain:

a. [10501 NE 6th St, Bellevue]

It was not running strongly, in fact so weakly that I'd pretty much have had to kiss the bowl to drink from it:

For various reasons, I went back to Bellevue on an expiring transfer yesterday, so I was able to take proper shots, running with newspaper, and location, but again I forgot the location shot.

Lincoln Square North

Lincoln Square Cinemas does indeed have a box rule, and I'm pretty sure the satchel I carried exceeded it that day, but the ticketseller let me past.  I enjoyed the movie a great deal.  However, it only started after about twenty minutes of commercials and ten of previews, and it's a really long movie in the first place, and I really had drunk copiously from water fountains in downtown Seattle.

So when I left the theatre, I was thinking two things:  1) it was really unfair for me to generalise about Bellevue street fountains on the basis of one example, and 2) I couldn't do anything about this unfairness until I'd found a restroom.

This resulted in the shocking discovery that there are no public restrooms in Lincoln Square North.  Who ever heard of an indoor mall without restrooms?  I even found a map that showed no restrooms.  However, when I went back yesterday, instead of going all the way up to that map, I settled for one at the entrance, and that does show restrooms - in a different building, Lincoln Square South.

(Look closely at Level 2, dear Diary.)

This presented three possibilities:  i) The lack was unique to this particular mall.  ii) The lack was in common among the malls that present themselves as "The Bellevue Collection".  iii) The lack was normal for Bellevue, perhaps for suburban, malls generally.  Considering that I'd just finished an epic list of libraries for which I fairly often recommended shopping malls as nearby places with restrooms, this last possibility was concerning.

Bellevue Square

Fortunately, the lack of restrooms is in fact just something about that particular mall.  Bellevue Square, across the street from Lincoln Square North and also part of "The Bellevue Collection", has restrooms, and has good signage enabling me to find them.

 

The first photo shows the sign inside the Macy's through which I'd entered, the second in the actual shopping mall space.  The mall's restrooms aren't what I'd think it would supply for its wealthy target market, but aren't by any means bad.

On the other hand, Bellevue Square does take some trouble to hide its food court, which isn't at the center of the first floor as usual, but hidden in a corner of the second.  I'd gotten kind of hungry, and anyway it took no time at all to determine that the only thing I could buy to compensate for using their restroom would be food.  (Normally, I'd just buy a couple of gumballs.  But Bellevue Square has no gum machines, and anyway I had no change.)  Once I finally found the food court, it turned out to include a Great State Burgers location.  I see that chain favourably because of employees who offered me food from there when I slept down the street from a location, and more so after something I'll tell you about soon, dear Diary.  But I'd never eaten their food.  So I decided to extend the splurge far enough to get a cheeseburger.

(It was somewhat discouraging, given my own current search for work, that all three of the Great State employees whom I saw are middle-aged like me.  The two ticketsellers I saw at Lincoln Square Cinemas are at least middle-aged, possibly actually old.  Do businesses in Bellevue hire teenagers for upper management to make up for depriving them of more usual teenage jobs?)

Once I'd eaten (at an outside bench, of course), I started cudgeling Open Street Map, which unlike Google Maps tries to show street fountains.  What I found then on my phone turned out to be all the street fountains Open Street Map actually shows between NE 12th St and the line of SE 4th St, and between 100th Ave NE and I-405.  Here's a map of that area from Open Street Map:

That turns out to be on just a bit too large a scale to show Open Street Map's symbol for a water fountain, which I've finally figured out - it shows a very small tap delivering water into a slightly larger partly-filled cup.  (I'd always thought that cup was a flowerpot, and couldn't figure out what it was doing there.)  Fortunately, Bellevue itself thinks its downtown is somewhat smaller:

and the symbol shows just fine on that scale:

One of those is fountain a above.  Here are the other two:

b. [10840 NE 6th St, Bellevue]

This fountain I remember, sort of in front of the Bellevue Transit Center's visitor's center.  It was of the type in Northacres Park and Cal Anderson Park, where you have to wait for the water because of the freeze-proofing.  I don't remember ever visiting in winter to see whether it was on, though.

Maybe it's still there behind those hoardings, but I'm not betting that way.  In any event, it isn't accessible this year.

c. [375 106th Ave NE, Bellevue]

The fountain at this location is definitely still there and accessible.  It just isn't running:

So where Seattle has, let's see, at least twelve outdoor water fountains downtown outside the parks, Bellevue's rather smaller downtown has at least three. [1]  Fair enough.  But where six of Seattle's were running strongly last week and/or Monday, none of Bellevue's were running strongly yesterday.

That said, Bellevue, like Seattle, does have downtown parks, and one of them has working water fountains.  But this page has already gotten long enough, so I'll tell you, dear Diary, about that park and about my hike home afterward in another page later today.  Happy hours until then.

[1] Bellevue's street fountains are even less documented than Seattle's, which is an impressive achievement on the part of whomever they belong to.  So of course, since Bellevue's downtown is much less familiar to me than Seattle's, it's possible there are more in places I haven't looked.

Downtown Seattle's Street Fountains This Week

Dear Diary,

After three afternoons and evenings of returning to downtown parks, I've re-visited three-quarters of my list.  But it's going to take me a bunch of work to write the pages most of those places need, and I wanted to get something written before then.

So I'm singling out one category of place.  Or maybe two.

To start with, twelve drinking water fountains that Seattle Public Utilities maintains on the streets of downtown Seattle.  Their pseudo-map of these fountains was updated after I last discussed it in July 2021, and now includes most fountains known to me.  Specifically, what I refer to as a "street fountain" is two related things:  a drinking water fountain on a city street, but also a specific style of drinking water fountain that in Seattle, in my experience, is usually used on streets but not in parks.  All twelve of these fountains are recognisably that style.

Five other water fountains downtown that SPU doesn't list are also in the same style.  Four of those latter five are on sidewalks adjacent to parks owned by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation; the fifth is actually inside such a park.  The parks are Westlake Park, Prefontaine Place, Pioneer Square with two fountains, and Hing Hay Park where the fountain is inside the park.  However, SPU isn't really consistent about this.  It lists a fountain in Occidental Square, and in North Seattle one (out of two) on the Burke-Gilman Trail.  Faced with such inconsistency, this page includes the five park-proximate ones too.

I haven't, in my hikes around downtown this week, been specifically looking for more street fountains; nor, for that matter, was I when I hiked around downtown last fall.  On the other hand, I did add a bunch of places to my initial lists last fall, and did add two so far this week; I'm not being completely unobservant.  But the fact is, SPU's initial June 2021 map showed fewer fountains than the current one shows.  So possibly there are downtown street fountains I haven't found and SPU still doesn't list.  Anyway, this page lists those known to me, in the order used by SPU, with the park-proximate fountains merged where I thought best.

Here's a map.  The SPU ones are black; the one in Occidental Square that's both SPU and parks is gray-green; and the ones that are only parks are green.

The pseudo-map presents the twelve as street addresses, and it can't be magnified to show downtown clearly.  So I name them both by the street addresses and by whatever else I think appropriate.  However, first:  I'm aware that my tagging system (well, Blogspot calls 'em labels, but they're tags) - anyway, I haven't tried to adapt it to downtown in any detail, let alone to specific street fountains there.  On top of which, the "labels" aren't even shown to readers reading on their phones.  So here are links to previous pages in which I've discussed downtown street fountains, and I'll cite those pages under each individual fountain as relevant.

1 - "Water Fountains:  Things We've Lost, Part II", 5/1/2020.

2 - "Ways to Fight Water Addiction", 6/18/2020.

3 - "Water Fountains - an Interim Report, Part III", 10/3/2020.

4 - "Credit Where It's Due:  Downtown Street Fountains", 7/5/2021.  This page includes two photos for each fountain covered, one to show where the fountain is, the other to show whether it provided water.  Page 2 did the same for the only fountain it covers; below, for fountains not covered by either page 2 or page 4, I provide location shots as well as water shots.  Page 4 also identifies three models of street fountains, differing at their bases.

5 - "Foolish Mortal Tackles Street Fountains Again", 7/6/2021.  This page includes no new visits to fountains, but mentions a few and maps both downtown and North Seattle street fountains.

6 - "Today's Hike: Many water fountains turned on in areas around the University", 7/10/2021.

Summary of this week's results:

• Running strongly - 7 (6 SPU, 1 park)
• Running other than strongly - 3 (1 SPU, 2 parks)
• Stripped to their bases - 4 (2 SPU, 2 parks)
  
• Completely missing - 3 (3 SPU, 0 parks)

Here they are:

A. 501 Olive Way

At the intersection of 5th Ave, Olive Way, and Westlake Ave.  Specifically, southeast of Olive and northeast of 5th.  Previously 1 (photo, damaged beyond use), 3 (photo, same condition), 4 (photos, damaged but useable).  Several of the northernmost ones downtown, in particular this one, now have a different bowl from the models shown in previous pages, in particular the three models shown in 4.

Yesterday evening, running strongly:

B. Westlake Park

This one is on the northeast side of 4th Ave, adjacent to the park.  If SPU gave it an address, that might be 1520 4th Ave.   Previously, 1 (photo, not running), 3 (photo, not running), 4 (photos, running strongly), 5 (only mentioned).

This afternoon, running unpredictably, but this photo is from yesterday afternoon:

C. 1529 3rd Avenue

On the southwest side of 3rd Ave, southeast of Pine St.  I haven't previously mentioned this specific one to you, dear Diary.

Yesterday afternoon, completely missing:

And a location shot taken this afternoon:

D. 1520 Pike Place

Near the northern corner of Post Alley and Pike Place.  I haven't previously mentioned it to you, dear Diary.

Yesterday evening, running strongly:

And a location shot taken this afternoon, which I obviously couldn't keep as clear of people as I prefer:

E. 100 Pike St

At the north corner of 1st Ave and Pike St.  Previously, 2 (photos, 1- location and 2 - damaged beyond use), 3 (photo, same condition), 4 (no photo, running).

Yesterday evening, running weakly:

F. 1000 2nd Ave

At the north corner of 2nd Ave and Madison St.  Previously 4 (photos, running), 5 (only mentioned), 6 (no photo, running, I didn't like the taste).

Yesterday afternoon, running strongly:

G. 1398 3rd Ave

At the east corner of 3rd Ave and Union St.  Previously, 1 (photo, not running), 3 (photo, not running), 4 (photos, running strongly), 6 (no photo, running, I didn't like the taste).

Yesterday afternoon, running strongly:

H. 898 3rd Ave

At the east corner of 3rd Ave and Marion St.  Previously, 6 (photo, not running).

Yesterday afternoon, stripped to its base:

This afternoon, a location shot:

Sorry it isn't clear, dear Diary.  You can see part of the fountain base there at the bottom.  I had trouble taking this picture because someone was standing just outside the frame; I think he was a messenger waiting for another delivery order, and he showed no sign of moving until he got one.  So I settled for this.

I. 200 Columbia St

Somewhere near 2nd Ave and Columbia St, presumably on the north corner.  Previously, 6 (couldn't find it).

I couldn't find it yesterday afternoon, either.  So this afternoon I came back and walked from Cherry to Marion streets and from 1st to 3rd avenues on both sides of the street, eight blocks of walking in all, just to see whether I could find any trace of this fountain.  And I couldn't.  My two leading hypotheses are:  1) Subsequent work on the sidewalks has erased the telltale signs of a completely removed fountain; or 2) This is SPU's little joke on anyone who relies on the map.

While SPU's addresses aren't all that reliable, they aren't nearly as bad as the parks department's.  So I looked particularly hard at the north corner, and took three photos to show that the pavement on that corner and for quite a way beyond it in each direction looks quite undisturbed.

J. 298 James St

At the west corner of 3rd Ave and James St.  Previously, 6 (no photo, damaged but useable).

This afternoon, stripped to its base: 

Also this afternoon, a location shot:

Another constrained shot.  Really, downtown is a lot more crowded than it was a year ago.

K. Prefontaine Place

This one is on 3rd Ave just north of Yesler Way.  If SPU gave it an address, that might be 501 3rd Ave.  I don't think I've previously mentioned this one to you, dear Diary.

Tuesday afternoon, stripped to its base:

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And this afternoon, a location shot:

Pioneer Square

L. East

This one is on the north side of Yesler Way just west of James St.  If SPU gave it an address, that might be 120 Yesler Way.  Previously, 4 (photo, running, no location shot) and 5 (only mentioned).

Tuesday afternoon,stripped to its base:

And, you guessed it, dear Diary!  This afternoon, a location shot:

M. West

This one is at the northeast corner of 1st Ave and Yesler Way.  If SPU gave it an address, that might be 100 Yesler Way, or 600 1st Ave.  Previously, 4 (photos, running strongly), 5 (only mentioned).

Tuesday afternoon, and this afternoon, running strongly as a spray, which isn't to say it's the light, gentle kind of spray, but the kind you want for washing an inanimate object, say, or maybe watering a garden:

N. 201 Occidental Ave (Occidental Square)

At what would have been the southwest corner of Occidental Ave S and S Washington St if the park weren't there instead.  Previously, 4 (photos, running strongly; this is the one wrongly identified there as at the north end of "Occidental Park").

Tuesday afternoon, running strongly:

O. 201 S Main St

At the northeast corner of 2nd Ave and Main St.  (That address is wrong, implying the southeast corner.)  I haven't previously mentioned this one to you, dear Diary.

Tuesday evening, running strongly:

And one last location shot taken this afternoon:

P. 398 Occidental Ave S

At the northeast corner of Occidental Ave S and S Jackson St, a block south of Occidental Square.  Previously, 4 (photos, running strongly; this is the one doubly wrongly identified there as at the south end of "Occidental Park").

Yesterday afternoon, completely missing:

Q. Hing Hay Park

Well within the park, but near Maynard Ave S, the northwest corner of Maynard and S King St.  I accidentally included what amounts to a location shot in the page that introduced Hing Hay Park a year ago.

Tuesday evening, running strongly:

And here, as a reward for anyone who's actually read all the way through this page, is a revised map.  Bright blue for running, bright red for not running.

 

And that's all for tonight, dear Diary.  Once my bus pass runs out, I hope this weekend to finish "Library Hours Six Months Later" with the last of the private libraries, and then use what appears to be a lot of dry weather coming to hike the North Seattle parks before settling down to the academic libraries perforce left over from "Six Months Later", and then a much less ambitious series "Library Hours One Year Later".  There should also be much more coming about downtown, but first, I still have about 25 places to visit there tomorrow.  (Mainly Seattle Center and Westlake Ave.)  And I don't yet know how fast I can write all these many pages up, because I don't yet know whether I'll find work quite soon, or instead become homeless again quite soon.  So happy nights and days until we meet again, dear Diary.