A Hike along Banner

Dear Diary,

Hooray!  This is the last page about the Wednesday and Saturday hikes.  Then my phone will be clear of photos meant for you, and I'll be able to go on more hikes, though they'll be different from the recent ones.

This page is about four places on Banner Way NE and on NE Banner Place.  Only one is an official Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation Park.  One is a Seattle Department of Transportation wannabe; two are leftover properties the city doesn't care much about.

A map:

Banner Way Triangle

This is a lawn on a triangle near NE 80th St and Banner Way NE.  It's rather like Corliss Place tilted:

But unlike Corliss Place, Banner Way Triangle has an amenity:

So why isn't it good enough for the parks department to recognise as a park, if it's better than Corliss Place?

Well, that's the wrong question.  Corliss Place is a park because you, Seattle Department of Transportation, managed to hand it off to the parks department before they got picky.  But of the properties you still own and think of as parks, only two in North Seattle have been accepted as such by the parks department, and they're both spectacular, Peace Park and the Wallingford Steps.  So the question isn't whether Banner Way Triangle is better than Corliss Place, which it clearly is, but whether it's good enough for the parks department to want to brag about.  And that, it clearly is not, at present.

Much depends on the site's native qualities.  This is never going to be as spectacular visually as the Wallingford Steps, and is unlikely to attract art as has Peace Park.  But there are big apartment buildings in the vicinity.  Why did I find this triangle deserted on a sunny spring evening?

The first thing you need to do, SDOT, if you want Banner Way Triangle to grow up to be a Real Park, is signage.  You need to tell the residents of those apartment buildings that they're welcome there.  Don't imitate the parks department's signage, which coasts on the department's brand and is full of NOs.  Instead, find a way to tell people what they can't do primarily by telling them what they can do.

And one way to do that is to find some neighbourhood group, or gin one up if there is none, and host their festival.  That's right.  You want people to actually trample that grass you lovingly tend (or hire the parks department to tend, whichever), one weekend per year, or maybe more.  The only way Banner Way Triangle, as currently conceived, is going to become cool enough for the parks department to covet is to become popular, and the most efficient way to make it popular is to put something popular there.

You're welcome.

Snippet at 7609 6th Ave NE

Snippet at 7602 6th Ave NE

This is another triangle resulting from Banner Way, and what a contrast to the SDOT park it is. 

This is what Banner Way Triangle would look like if nobody cared about it as long as the neighbours didn't complain.

 

Six thousand square feet, this is, being wasted.  How many homeless people could pitch their tents there, I wonder.  It's also conveniently close to a Safeway, whose restrooms have exceptionally long hours; that's where I relieved myself after the arduous hike Wednesday.

Do you hear the warning I'm giving, Seattle Department of Financial and Administrative Services?  Do something with this land, or don't complain when someone else does.

Snippet at 640 NE Banner Place

There is a house at 640 NE Banner Place.  East of that house is a steep slope, landscaped as best possible, and 214 square feet of that slope, possibly including some of what's in this next photo, is city property.  I think.

Rainbow Point

This is a much better park than Corliss Place, as most parks are, thankfully.  Rainbow Point is vaguely symmetrical, with two low sides:

surrounding a central hillock:

 

Although I usually find kids playing on the hillock, the park's purpose in existing is its views, which disturbs its symmetry:  the western side includes a viewing area with benches, which the eastern side doesn't.  Here are the views I shot Wednesday night:

I went back Saturday because I figured those views would be worse than they actually are.  So here are three more, with different light:

And another picture of the hillock, which was kid-free that hour:

On that trip, I also passed a much smaller triangle than the three above, between Roosevelt Way NE and Lake City Way NE at NE 75th St.  I have no idea who owns it; it isn't in the city's real property report, but that doesn't prove the city isn't the owner.  Anyway, I took a picture of some flowers there:

But now it's a quarter hour into quiet time and I'm still clicking a very loud trackpad button, so I'd better stop.  Tomorrow, dear Diary, at least two pages and probably more about why these hikes have to be paused now, and what sorts of pages I'll be writing in you instead.

A Hike in Victory - and Defeat

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry, this isn't 8 A.M., is it?  That's kind of the point of one of the pages I now probably won't have time to write today.  So let me instead get on with the pages about the city properties of the third region I've hiked in May.  This page covers sites - actually, this time they're all Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation parks - between Roosevelt Way NE and Lake City Way NE from about NE Northgate Way to about NE 95th St.

A map:

Victory Creek Park

One of my goals for this set of hikes was to "do justice" to the Natural Areas, meaning explore them enough to a) take some good photos and b) explain them reasonably well to your readers, dear Diary.  This page is essentially about how I started to give that goal up, and the start of that start was in Victory Creek Park.

See, I'd forgotten something about that park, which is that every other square foot of it spawns trails.  Walking in that park is a weird combination of running into dead ends, and running into choices of something like a dozen ways to go.  I think Escher is the only person who could ever have mapped it.

Basically, this park is built around the titular creek.  It has trails on each side of the creek.  There are a number of entrances to the park, and when I said in introducing it in "South to and from Northgate" that I'd only found entrances from a QFC parking lot, I was really saying I'd been lazy.  One entrance is beside this bench on Northgate Way:

which is not the bench I photographed in the previously mentioned page as the (I claimed) only bench.  Argh.  Anyway, I took a couple of landscape shots and gave up this time too:

Victory Heights Playground

At least if I couldn't do justice to a small natural area, I could do justice to a small playground.  Its water fountains weren't running, again:

But even before that, I took pictures of this park's tourist attraction, which is playground equipment with translucent panes attached at the top, so that on sunny days there are coloured shadows all over the place.  There are actually two areas of playground with such equipment, but I only took pictures of one:

Finally, I took a couple of landscapes:

I should mention that those water fountains are attached to a school building, which is occupied by a non-public school, though not quite a business:  the Victory Heights Co-Op Preschool.  So if one goes as a tourist, one should be considerate of timing.  I also don't actually know that the parks department owns those water fountains (or the building they're attached to), although its web page for this park lists the water fountains as an amenity.

I then went to one part of 

Kingfisher Natural Area

I wouldn't know a kingfisher by sight, but there's at least one thing kingly about this park:  It's much the largest Natural Area in North Seattle, fifteen acres.  I had that information with me at the time, but didn't look it up; I just looked at the map on Open Street Map, looked at the time - almost 4:30 P.M. - and shook my head.  In "South to and from Northgate" I wrote that at the park's address as given (to this day) by Google, at 17th Ave NE and NE 104th St (these are actually the same street, which turns there), "there's a very obvious trail that runs quite straight down to the creek".  But I didn't go to that address this time, but to the place where NE 105th St dead ends despite having already crossed the creek (the upper dot on the map above).  There, the obvious trail only goes partway to the creek, is steeply downhill, and is not especially straight.  I explored quite a bit from there, led on by Open Street Map's appearing to claim that I could cross 15th Ave NE (present as a bridge overhead) on a trail.  I found a place where someone had abandoned a bunch of books, some of which I might have wanted to read but now sadly water-damaged, and one DVD, which I took.  I also took this photo along the way, I think:

I didn't, of course, find a way across 15th (and the South Fork of Thornton Creek), but did find a way to clamber up to 15th, which was good enough for my purposes, because I'd skipped several places along the way.  I didn't actually find any of those places, but took a photo where I thought one might be:

Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area

This is a quarter-acre park which is apparently, according to Thornton Creek watershed maps (such as the one online or the one in the park called Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel), south of the actual confluence, that is, where Victory Creek, the creek of Victory Creek Park, flows into the South Fork, the creek of the WQC and of Kingfisher Natural Area.  Somehow I got the idea that this confluence was directly north of the dead end of 10th Place NE.  So I went to that dead end and found this shrubbery blocking the way:

I figure it's pretty enough shrubbery to be worth showing you, dear Diary, the picture, but it isn't actually blocking the Natural Area, which is east of as well as north of this spot, and whose exact location remains a mystery to me.

Kingfisher Natural Area

So I went back to Kingfisher, specifically its actual official address, which is 1511 NE 105th St.  Which makes it unsurprising that, as I noted with surprise last year, the official park signage is here, such as it minimally is.  I was by this point tired, and very worried about reaching Maple Leaf Reservoir Park before its restrooms shut, both for reasons involving you, dear Diary, and reasons involving my own need to do Number One, which I no longer figure I'm entitled to do in daytime outside, now that I'm housed.  So at 5:30 P.M. I settled for taking two photos of the entrance, which makes everything a little clearer.  This is the lower of the two dots on the map.

And then went on to my next hike, much further south.  I hope I still have time to tell you both about that one and the last one for this region, dear Diary, tonight.

I also had to give up, here, my hope to explore the woods shown by Open Street Map that didn't have obvious explanations.  This hike included massive woods of this sort, along Victory Creek and the South Fork pretty much everywhere between the parks.  Obviously if I wasn't going to clamber around Kingfisher, which I know to be public property, I wasn't going to clamber around areas that might for all I know be private.

Sometime this year I also hope to get back to Kingfisher Natural Area, and for that matter to Victory Creek Confluence Natural Area and Victory Creek Park and Open Street Map's woods, but it won't be soon.

A Hike in Northgate, part II

Dear Diary,

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

Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel

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

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

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

The creek enters this park through an artificial waterfall:

and then passes under two bridges:

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

I think this photo was just random:

 

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

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

Maple Leaf Community Garden

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

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

Beaver Pond Natural Area, round 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Visit to Hubbard Homestead

Dear Diary,

Hubbard Homestead is a park about one block north of Northgate Mall, and directly north of the building called Northgate North.  It does not include any actual homestead in the sense of a building of its own, or a farmyard, or whatever; the Hubbard family "homestead" (meaning home, or what exactly?) occupied the space from 1913-1968, according to the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation web page, which was probably too late for farming thereabouts anyway.

It does include a fair amount of neat park stuff, though, starting with an astonishing number of wooden benches:

As you can see, dear Diary, those benches are helpfully near a bus stop, a pretty major bus stop, actually.  They are not, however, the park's most popular feature.  That would be its skatebowl.  I'd probably have to get there at dawn to photograph that without including any people.

That said, this is yet another park with a basketball half-court, although the lines are fading:

I fear it's also another park struck by the scourge of graffiti, which for some reason the parks maintenance guys didn't get around to removing over the winter.  I've shown you these stones before, dear Diary, but look at them now:

All that paint still on them, and even a symbol on one.  Shameful.

All this is in the eastern part of the park, the part most familiar to me.  I headed west.  (The park's south is interesting too, but between the skatebowl and some guy who seemed to be all over it, was too challenging to photograph.)

The park also has stone benches, and one extravagant combination of wood and stone:

There's a complex sort of woods at the west end of the park, north of the skatebowl.  The wicked graffiti-doers have struck here too:

By this point I was noticing unusual performance in red and yellow with my phone's camera, so I tried something I don't normally try:

No, I don't know why that sort of worked.

The only picnic tables in the park are north of the woods, and unfortunately are metal.  Maybe that's meant to encourage people to be fast with their picnics, so others can have a chance at the tables.

Another view of the woods:

Now, Hubbard Homestead has been promised a playground.  See, there used to be a playground at Victory Creek Park, a few blocks east.  It was behind the times, though, so the parks department told the neighbourhood it would be cheaper to make a new one than to renovate, and somehow moving it to Hubbard Homestead would be better than leaving it at Victory Creek.  (Though I see a lot more little kids in the quiet blocks around the latter than in the busy, high-traffic ones around the Homestead.)  That playground is not yet built at Hubbard Homestead, though the old one was gone from Victory Creek before I first stepped foot in that park, looking for it.  Sources:  Pinehurst Seattle, parks department, parks department (PDF).

However, Open Street Map already shows a playground at Hubbard Homestead, north of the basketball half-court.  Since I needed to leave via 5th Ave NE in order to reach the next set of parks (which I won't be telling you about tonight, dear Diary), my last stop in the park was to investigate.  It turns out Hubbard Homestead does already have a set of exercise machines, playground equipment for adults and older teens:

But I admit, I'm likely to go on thinking of it primarily as a place to rest when wandering around Northgate.  Good night, dear Diary.