All Night Long, Questions Edition, part III: Some Answers

Dear Diary,

I have access to two 24-hour restrooms simply by virtue of being housed at present.

So who needs 24-hour restrooms in public places?  People who are in public places, obviously.  But only a subset of those, who are outside when most others are inside.  Such as:

• Drunk partiers.
• Truckers and other travellers.
• Shift workers. 
• Homeless people.

And, in fact, Google Scholar believes only homeless people use them.  I guess scholars whose work shows up there don't party or travel much, let alone work weird shifts.

Or wait...

Actually, Google Scholar believes something very specific about 24-hour restrooms.  It only finds seven results, and of those, the first four are about this state, and the first three are about Seattle.  Three different studies discussing Seattle's lack of 24-hour restrooms as a really efficient way of criminalising homelessness, Seattle as a place that could give Burien lessons in cruelty.

But the thing is, homeless people aren't an efficiently serveable market.  I don't think one can map where 24-hour restrooms could best help the homeless, although a bunch downtown would sure help.

One can map how to serve those other markets, though.

For drunks, you want restrooms where the party is.  Belltown (and why does Parks have responsibility for providing 24-hour restrooms, but Seattle Center escape that task?).  Pioneer Square.  Capitol Hill.  The Ave.  Southern Fremont.  The obvious solution is for SPU to set things up there.  University Playground was always a poor substitute, and will probably never get an actual useable restroom pair back until its 24-hour heritage is forgotten.

For truckers and such, you want rest stops.  Not being a driver, I don't actually know where the nearest ones are, but having been homeless for eight years, I do know they aren't close.  This is, then, the proper responsibility for Parks in this area. Without snarky lies.  The most obvious examples are up north.  Bitter Lake Playfield and Northacres Park and Playfield are both close to major routes.  Problem is, none of their restrooms, not even Northacres Playfield's that usually stays open year-round, are really set up for cold weather.  If Parks is serious about weatherising its restrooms, those three should be high on the list.  I also observed many, many drivers on Sand Point Way stopping at the park I used to call BGPP, now Pathways Park; a good use for a security contract might be longer hours for that park, if Sand Point stays busy late.

I would expect any park positioned as a sort of rest stop to try to monetise this with nearby businesses.

Finally, for shift workers, transit agencies should take the lead.  Unfortunately, the tradition around Seattle is for transit agencies to pretend that we're all bodiless energy beings, and build restrooms but allow nobody to use them.  (And no, Northgate Station is not, after all, an exception.)  I don't know how many centuries it'll take those agencies to get over this - I've seen physical evidence of it as long ago as the 1970s if not earlier.  A governor or U.S. president might be able to hurry it along, though.

I wanted to put, somewhere early in this part, the about-face "The Parks department has no business running 24-hour restrooms", but I don't think that's quite true.  Seattle Center would probably be better at the park/commerce mix ideal for a rest stop, but I suspect Parks already has the real estate all over town, and I certainly wouldn't want to see Freeway Park Center-ised.

But there's another issue with regard to Parks and 24-hour restrooms.  It would probably be expensive to hire attendants for a public restroom at Broadway and Pine, but as long as a Seattle that takes the need for public restrooms seriously tries to rely on Parks, it'll have to hire people just to check whether Parks is lying about them.  Attendants could get tips, so they'd probably be stabler employees.

All Night Long, Questions Edition, part II: Official

Dear Diary,

I was going to wait until Saturday to tell you what's in this part, and then another week for part III, but after tonight's hike, I don't see the point.

As you know, dear Diary, I'm not doing "Building a Baseline" the way I wanted to, because that way wouldn't have gotten me to all the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation water fountains before they started getting turned off.  And that, in turn, was because Parks didn't get me a trustworthy list of water fountains when I asked for one.  So instead I'm making a mad dash to visit all of Parks's locations looking for water fountains.

And the obvious place to start, dear Diary, the richest trove of close-together Parks locations, is where we in fact started way back when, in the U-District.  Well, I decided to combine it with Ravenna, and trying to follow all the trails in Ravenna and Cowen parks soaked up much of a day.  But on Friday, September 11, I finally arrived at University Playground at 8:47 am and found the restrooms not open yet.

Only wait a minute.  Didn't I see in the popular tool Parks runs, "Find a Restroom in a Park", that University Playground's restrooms are not only open, but open 24 hours?  Yep, there it is:

Now, how could it be that someone went to University Playground on September 10 specifically to close its restrooms so they'd be respectfully closed on the anniversary?

Still, I thought it better to wait to say anything.  So I wrote part I of this page even after getting photos at 2:30 pm on the 12th:

and without mentioning it.  And then on the 13th, imagine, dear Diary, my surprise when I showed up at 3:30 pm and found this:

So, tonight.  I'd been more careful than on September 5th, but the house I live in has a "quiet time", and I had a sandwich at home I wanted to eat, so I wanted to wash my hands.

I didn't get going until pretty late, indeed not, as I'd thought, within "park hours" (6 am to 10 pm), but I was so optimistic.  Only to find that women's room not only locked but chained and padlocked as if to shout as loudly as possible, "Yes, you want it, but we won't let you have it".  And I didn't even actually want it - with my luck, the woman of my dreams would show up while I was washing my hands and shriek in horror.

So on I went to the nearest, at that point, of the city's other official 24-hour restrooms, at Gas Works Park.  Where I wandered for some time before accepting that the old restroom building was gone.  It's been replaced by three single-user stalls, which is definitely fewer than the old building had, 

and are you surprised, dear Diary, to hear they were all locked?

At this point, I can't even pretend to care whether the remaining one, the Portland Loo at Ballard Commons, has an external lock or not.  Obviously the list of restrooms open "park hours" in the "Find a Restroom in a Park" tool is simply another batch of lies from the Parks department.

Your readers, dear Diary, may be able to play along at home!  So here are the ones not in North Seattle:

• Alki Beach 57th Ave SW
• Alki  Beach 63rd Ave SW
• Alki Beach Bathhouse
• Armeni Boat Ramp
• Discovery Park South Bluff
• Queen Anne Bowl
• Seacrest Park
• South Park Community Center

Are any of those really open 24 hours?  Let us know!

Two details to finish up with before part III.  All the restrooms I'm talking about are, according to the now tainted tool, open "park hours", not "24 hours".  Why is that?  Well, Parks wouldn't want to encourage any lawbreaking in pursuit of anything so trivial as the cessation of pain, now would they?

But it only takes a moment's thought to see this as a charade.  First of all, Parks only has a few schedules for their parks.  To take North Seattle alone, Green Lake Park and Ballard Commons close at 11:30 pm, Gas Works Park and University Playground at 10 pm.  Are they really keeping two staffers busy at such hours locking restrooms in North Seattle?

Second, nobody but homeless people with smartphones is going to care about restrooms open "park hours".  The point of the charade is to associate the reliable 24-hour restrooms at Green Lake with all these lies, to make the lies easier to swallow.  Why they'd want to make lies easier to swallow, though, I have no idea.  Is the person in charge of the tool a sadist?

And Green Lake is the other detail.  On September 5th I visited that park's North restrooms (in the tool, and in Parks parlance, "wading pool").  And tonight I finally washed my hands at the 64th St restrooms ("65th St").  For some reason they don't lie about the real 24-hour restrooms at Green Lake.

This is a depressing page, dear Diary, and I'm afraid the only way I can offer hope in the next part, coming up soon, is based on the premise of Seattle doing things right.  Well, Parks wouldn't have gotten away with what they're doing if Seattle were in the habit of doing things right.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part VIII: The Route 322 south of NE 98th Street

Dear Diary,

This is probably the least-informed part of this page.  There's a lot I don't know about bus service on southern Lake City Way NE, except that there's never been all that much of it.

Buses started running on that part of that street in the late 1970s; there's no bus there in the 1977 map, but there is one, the route 307, in the 1979 map.  In September 2002, the 307 was replaced by Sound Transit route 522; this was regarded as a great improvement.  But in December 2009 (143-page PDF, page 129), the 522 had no stops between NE 125th Street and downtown Seattle; it now has one (14-page PDF), which happens to be in the area of interest, at NE 85th Street.  (During most of the 2010s, Sound Transit had the bright idea of keeping all its route maps in a GIS application that causes the Internet Archive to shrink in horror, so I have no idea when that stop appeared.)  At any rate, the northbound stop is #38235, and I'd be very surprised if the southbound one weren't #23595.

As for the stops here, Route 322 was created in October 2021.  The buses that had operated in that corridor in the 19 years between the 307 and the 322, besides the 522, were the route 306 and the route 312.  According to Sound Transit's map books, these were both suburban express buses operating only during rush hours, and probably commuter, one-directional, buses too.  I wouldn't ordinarily expect them to make stops along Lake City Way, but then, I grew up in places that treated the word "express" more seriously than Metro does.  (In Metro-speak, any bus that skips even a single stop it passes, more or less, is an "express", with exceptions for skip-stop patterns downtown.)  At any rate, these six stops exist now, and aren't supposed to exist come Saturday, but are supposed to exist again someday, unlike any of the stops I've discussed so far.  Because supposedly Metro is going to get serious about bus service on Lake City Way in the form of a new route with a two-digit number, the route 77, just as soon as Sound Transit takes the 522 away.

But for now, these stops are closing, and if I know anything about the future, it's that none of it is set in stone.

As before, the links in the lists of stops take you to one or more photos of the relevant stop stored at my Google Drive account.

Lake City Way NE

As I started hiking on Sunday, before I'd even reached any bus stops, I encountered a sticker that cheered me up, which may not quite have been its intent.

 

Northbound, two stops:

• Stop #38560, north of NE 95th Street.
• Stop #23594, just southeast of 16th Avenue NE.  It's between NE 80th and 82nd Streets.  This is the one I missed on my first hike Sunday, because it doesn't have a normal sign.
  
  It's also the one whose rider alert claims it'll be served by route 79 after the 322 goes north.  The 79 runs on NE 75th Street, more than five blocks away, and its new schedule shows no change in that.  So while there's a chance that the sign is telling the truth, and that chance is probably greater than the chance that my yet-to-be-conceived first child will be elected United States President this November, it isn't much greater, and I think I'm on safe ground expecting this stop to be closed soon.
  
  

Southbound, three stops:

• Stop #38230, just north of NE 95th Street.  I doubt the mural behind this stop was commissioned by Metro, but anyway, here's a photo of part of it:
  
  
  
• Stop #38236, northeast of NE 80th Street.  This stop is shared with the route 73.
  
• Stop #38237, just northeast of NE 75th Street.  This stop is shared with the route 73.
  

12th Avenue NE

Northbound, one stop:

• Stop #23593, north of NE 75th Street.  This stop is shared with the route 73.
  

A suggested stop

Six stops, plus whatever handful more further north, is not a lot.  This is not a very impressive route 77 we're looking forward to.  Remember, dear Diary, Lake City Way is diagonal, which means these five-block-apart stops are rather further apart than five blocks apart on more regular streets.

But let's for the moment run with five blocks apart anyway.  For those not keeping score at home, we now have the following:

Stops 23593 and 38237 near 75th.

Stops 23594 and 38236 near 80th.

Stops probably 23595 and certainly 38235 near 85th.

Stops 38560 and 38230 near 95th.

What's missing from this picture?

There are a lot of destination businesses along this part of Lake City Way, but they're of a particular kind ill-suited to bus service.  They are car repair shops, tire shops, car lots both new and used, gas stations ...  The whole vast paraphernalia of automobile service is welcome on southern Lake City Way.  There's a storage location, and although I use a different one myself, I think it's reasonable to count that as part of the automotive orientation of LCW.  There are also, of course, bars, restaurants, and the like, most of which I don't take seriously as destinations.

At the obvious hole in the stop map, there's a bar, The Shanty Tavern, in the northeast corner, a restaurant, Phayathai Cuisine, in the southwest corner, and it's easy to see why there isn't a bus stop there.

Except that it's also easy to see why there should be a bus stop there.  Phayathai Cuisine is one floor of a great big apartment building.  Across NE 90th Street, on the northwest corner, there's another, special, kind of apartment building, Emerald City Senior Living.  Which maintains a van for its residents, but presumably also gets visitors.  And, um, there's one other destination, which I strongly suspect is the real reason there's no bus stop there, at the southeast corner:  Pandora Night Club, also known as Pandora Adult Cabaret and a wide variety of similar names.  (I said, in the previous part, anent beaches, dear Diary, that we'd get back to the topic of nudity.  I wonder - just how widely do Metro buses re-route around Fremont on the day of the solstice parade?)

So yes, one glance at Pandora, and one knows that this intersection is a no-go zone for all right-thinking Seattleites; it is indeed easy to see why there isn't a bus stop there.  But hundreds of Seattleites, right-thinking or not, live at that intersection, and wouldn't it be courteous to offer them bus service?  Even if that made it excessively convenient for some sinners to go about their perfectly legal business?

Well, anyway, dear Diary, I'm now done with what I wanted to say about Metro's reductions of bus service this month, that are somehow being sold as increases in service in media better known than you and I are.  As I read the books listed in part IV, or any comments that appear once I tell some people that this page exists, I may find that I need to add a "Foolish Mortal" page correcting my mistakes about buses, but we can hope not.

In any event, we'll be back to parks and libraries pretty soon, but I have some movies to watch first.  So until then, dear Diary, happy days and happy nights.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part V: The Route 20

Dear Diary,

FINALLY!  Some of the photos that are the point of this page.

Near as I can tell, the seventy-nine bus stops in question have anywhere from zero to five amenities.  My photographs treat these amenities somewhat differently.

• Pavement.  In general, I was photographing upward, so my photos don't show at all whether the bus stop has noticeable paving.  However, this amenity is a requisite for the next, so any stop that has that also has this.
• Shelter.  I did take pains to photograph shelters.  This amenity is a requisite for the next.
  
• Art.  I didn't see any murals that seemed intended for the bus stops, or anything like that, but many Metro bus shelters include photos under the auspices of the Photographic Center Northwest, and that includes some shelters likely to be re-located soon.  I took pains to include excerpts in my photos.  Neither this nor the next two are requisites for any of the others.
  
• Trash cans.  I'm pretty sure I encountered none at the route 28 stops I visited first, but the only route for which I specifically took pains to photograph evidence of trash cans was the route 20, whose stops I visited last.  This may seem an odd sort of amenity, but I'm quite sure it's actually a significant expense of any route that includes it.
  
• Benches.  I took pains to photograph these.  All but one are metal, of the kind usual in Metro shelters.

Open Street Map shows bus stops, and identifies some by cross streets, but if it has stop numbers or other metadata, I can't find them.  I remember, some time since I got housed in March 2021, finding a bus stop map at King County Metro's website, but I can't find it again now, and don't know whether it had metadata either.

I took no notes while hiking, trusting a) that I wouldn't miss anything so big and obvious as a bus stop and b) that I'd be able to correlate my photos with Open Street Map.  The latter confidence was well-placed, partly because the "rider alert" signs attached to most of these stops turn out to be fairly rich in geographical detail.

The links usually point to my Google Drive's folder of the photo(s).

N 80th Street

N 80th Street, 1st Ave NE, and Woodlawn Ave NE were parts of the route 16 by October 1943.

One northbound stop:

• Stop # 17610, just east of the alley between Corliss Avenue N and Sunnyside Avenue N.

One southbound stop:

• Stop #17100, just west of Corliss Avenue N.  Has a shelter (hence paving), art, a bench, and a trash can.  Obviously worth showing you one of the photos, dear Diary:
  
   

1st Avenue NE

Two northbound stops:

• Stop #17600, just south of NE 80th Street.  Although I've waited at this stop for the route 20 several times, I managed to miss the stop while hiking north, and had to photograph it while going back south.
• Stop #17590, just north of NE 77th Street.
  

Two southbound stops:

• Stop #17110, just south of NE 80th Street.
• Stop #17120, just south of NE 77th Street.

Woodlawn Avenue NE

Two northbound stops:

• Stop #17570, just southeast of the alley between 2nd Ave NE and Latona Ave NE.  This is the library stop, north of Green Lake.  At this stop, whether by mistake or as a bad joke, the sign claims readers should sit tight, because the route 45 will detour from East Green Lake Drive N just for them.  At stop #17140, across the street from this one, the sign forecasts the stop's closure; I don't see how both can be right.
  
  
• Stop #17560, just south of the alley between NE 72nd Street and NE 71st Street.  This stop, unusually for a northbound stop anywhere in North Seattle, has a bench, and further unusually for any bus stop, the bench is wooden rather than metal.  I wonder whose actual property this bench is, and what will become of it when the stop is removed.  Someone was sitting on it when I was photographing, so the photo is oblique.
  
  
  

Two southbound stops:

• Stop #17140, somewhat southeast of Latona Ave NE.  Has all the amenities:
  
  
  
• Stop #17160, halfway between NE 71st Street and NE Ravenna Boulevard.  Has a bench adjacent to City of Seattle trash cans.

The next southbound stop, stop #17170 announced as 5th Ave NE but actually closer to 4th Ave NE, south of Green Lake, appears to need no requiem.  The sign says the route 62 is adopting it, and since the route 62 actually passes that spot along Woodlawn, there's no reason to doubt that.  That stop has pavement, a shelter, and a trash can.

NE Ravenna Boulevard

These fiddly bits of the route were actually part of the 26 route, not the 16, from at latest 1949 onward.

One northbound stop:

• Stop #26210, just northeast of Woodlawn Ave NE.  I always thought this was the schedule's little joke, never noticed an actual stop there when riding north, never noticed anyone board or exit there.  (I'm really not the most observant of people, dear Diary.)  So I was quite surprised Sunday, to find it really exists.

4th Avenue NE

One southbound stop:

• Stop #26220, just northeast of NE 65th Street.  This is an actual unpaved stop, somewhat unusual for this route.
  

2nd Avenue NE

One northbound stop:

• Stop #27160, north of Woodlawn Avenue NE.
  

Latona Avenue NE

Part of the route 20's path on Latona is the oldest part of the route.  Latona from NE 56th Street to NE 65th Street was first used for streetcars in 1908, according to Blanchard's Street Railway Era in Seattle, page 65.  The rest of Latona (and Thackeray, below) was in use for buses by January 1941.

The older northern part is apparently the likeliest of these parts of the route to be revived, although that isn't very likely at all.  As recently as 2020, Metro was apparently willing to return to the Meridian streetcar route (2-page PDF).  The problem is, the Seattle Department of Transportation believes the current pavement of NE 56th Street isn't hard enough to stand up to frequent buses, and considers hardening that pavement a low priority, which appears to me to be bureaucratic polite-speak for "Never".

Anyway, eight northbound stops:

• Stop #27150, just south of NE 65th Street.
• Stop #27140, just north of the line of NE 62nd Street.
• Stop #27130, just north of NE 60th Street.
• Stop #27120, just north of NE 58th Street.
• Stop #27100, just north of NE 54th Street.
• Stop #27090, just north of NE 52nd Street.
• Stop #27052, just south of NE 50th Street.  Has a trash can.
  
• Stop #27051, north of NE 45th Street.  When I was working in Ballard, in the spring of 2023, this was usually where I waited in the evening for the route 20 until it came or I gave up and walked.  Mildly unusually for a northbound stop, it has all the amenities except a bench.  So I had all kinds of fun trying to fish the schedule out of my satchel without setting the satchel down, because the pavement was rain-wet.  At least the art was diverting.
  
  
  
  
  

Five southbound stops:

• Stop #26230, south of NE 64th St.  This is where my hourlong waits for the route 26 happened.
  
• Stop #26240, north of NE 60th St.
• Stop #26250, just south of NE 59th St.
• Stop #26270, south of NE 55th St.  This is the stop for, according to Open Street Map, McDonald International Elementary School.  So it's the only one of these with amenities:  shelter, bench, art.
  
  
  
• Stop #26290, south of NE 51st St.

Thackeray Place NE

Two southbound stops:

• Stop #26301, just south of NE 50th Street.
• Stop #26302, just north of NE 45th Street.
   

And that's it, dear Diary.  That's the legacy of the route 20, and of the route 26 before it.  Kinda sad, isn't that?

I have to go find three 28 stops, one 73 stop, and figure out why my results on Lake City Way differed so from Open Street Map, before I can write the remaining parts of this page in you, dear Diary.  I hope to finish that today, but won't be surprised if it takes until tomorrow.  Happy hours, day and night, until then.

Seattle Parks Is Trying to Tell the Truth. Will I Survive the Shock?

Dear Diary,

I have a notion that being an inveterate liar is kind of like other moral failings, and so although lying has never been an important sin to me, I can figure out what it's like by analogy.  I think there are two ways to try to stop sinning in general, and so lying in particular.  One is the folk wisdom that a sinner has to "hit bottom", get to where confessing and giving up the sin is the only way forward.  But the other is to work on one's personality and one's reality until giving up the sin won't hurt so much.  In this particular case, until lying is no longer needed.  That path, which is if anything harder than hitting bottom and making other people responsible for dealing with it, is the path it seems to me the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has chosen.

I pointed out a number of ludicrous details in the department's new "dashboard" (a word I kind of wish had died of COVID-19 toward the end of the pandemic, but still, that's what it's called).  It said Cowen Park's restrooms, which had been damaged by early opening in March 2022 and hadn't re-opened since, were open.  It said Ravenna Park's lower pair of restrooms, which have been perennial targets of vandals, and where the men's room hadn't opened at all in 2022, were both open.  And to top this series of obvious whoppers off, it said University Playground's restrooms, which hadn't been opened by parks department employees at any time since before the pandemic started, were both open.

I recently learnt that I wasn't quite as poor as I thought I was, because my bank hadn't charged a fee I'd expected them to charge.  So today I splurged on a newspaper and went hiking, prepared to mock yet another parks department lying map afterward.

I found both of Cowen Park's restrooms open today.

I found all four of Ravenna Park's restrooms open today.

I didn't find either of University Playground's restrooms open today, but a small group of homeless people there told me that was because they'd been locked half an hour earlier.  Considering that it was 5:41 P.M. when I was told this, that's testimony to way too early closing, but still, sadly, believable.  Supporting this preposterous turn of events actually having happened, the restroom doors both had new handles (dear Diary, your readers can, if they wish, compare the handle shown here to those in previous photos via the tags at the bottom of the page, or directly here if reading on cell phones, which didn't offer those tags the last time I looked.)

Notice, dear Diary, that these handles are set into circular supports; the previous handles, which were blocky rather than delicate themselves, weren't set into anything like that.  I think the evidence is good that University Playground's restrooms have finally re-opened.

So the parks department has done the hard work to justify its claims regarding all the restrooms I visited today.  Including those at Burke-Gilman Playground Park.  Now, this is where Google Maps lied to me today; it claims the whole park is temporarily closed.  

 

But actually, well, let's see if I can do this:

(I was trying to just paste a print-screen from OpenStreetMap into the page.  No, I couldn't.  Darn.)  Only part of the park is closed, the northeastern part.  The parks department also tells the truth about this:

And someone carefully removed the sign adjacent to the Burke-Gilman Trail there pointing the way to the restrooms.

 

Yes, dear Diary, they're building new restrooms there.  I hope this time they're winter-proof, but I sure hope, if I become homeless again before winter and there's another pandemic, they finish quickly.

I remembered from long ago that the neatest thing I thought Burke-Gilman Playground Park had to offer was a play fortress thingy sort of at the northwestern corner of the northeastern part of the park.  So I looked in its direction from the street, but couldn't tell whether it'd been protected or not.  (I'm more pessimistic that the actually neater sundial, also mentioned in that page, could've stayed in situ and been safe, so I hope it was moved.)  The building all that landscape destruction is in aid of is still standing, but perhaps so far all they've had time to do is pull the plumbing out.  (In the photo I uploaded to Google Drive, at full size a viewer can see the holes where the water fountain was attached.)

Anyway, my point is, that this morning when I checked the dashboard again hoping they'd have stopped, as I thought, lying and I could do other stuff today, they showed a bunch of restrooms as closed due to "Capital Project"s, and this was one of them.

Their water fountain map is still way too optimistic, I suspect; it's now up to 5 off, 206 on.  I found three off today, but one isn't theirs; it's the one where University Methodist Temple used to be, the stone edifice of the water fountain (not the church) still standing, but with no plumbing left inside.  I've reported the "lower" Ravenna Park fountain using "Find It - Fix It", which is how they say they want updates to those maps.  I haven't reported yet the weird stone water fountain pretty far southwest in Laurelhurst Playfield.  I guess I'll see what happens to the water fountain map tomorrow, when I plan to hide from the rain, having already lost my umbrella this year.

The Seattle Times, whose weather forecaster likes to go to extremes, is currently predicting lows for the weekend of 33º Friday night, 32º Saturday night, and 34º Sunday night.  Usually the parks department has been able to shrug off October freezes, but if the Times's extremism comes true (as it does depressingly often), that may be a too long-lasting example for the same reaction.   No official word yet, but my point, dear Diary, is that as usual, I've left it too late to get every park visited before it all changes.  The questions is whether it matters.  Is the parks department really turning over a new leaf?  Will it, for example, admit what's happening when it closes the majority of its restrooms for the winter?  Or is this just another episode in a longer battle?

One reason I've been paying so much attention to libraries lately, dear Diary, is to have another string to your bow as well as my own.  I think the last thing I expected was to have the parks department remove your raison d'être, but if it happens, it happens.  I will admit, I found myself getting both reminiscent and bored today as I took all these photos; I really didn't want, in particular, to get the only newspaper I can probably afford soon wet by photographing water fountains.  (And Jenny Durkan is no longer in office, so need I really worry about another Durkan Drought?  Well, only if there's another pandemic...)

Anyway, photos other than the above (most of those above are actually not at these links):

Cowen Park

Ravenna Park

Burke-Gilman Trail, 30th Ave fountain

Burke-Gilman Playground Park (including none of the photos above, only the photo that sort of shows where the water fountain was)

Laurelhurst Community Center (restrooms) and Playfield (water fountains)

Burke-Gilman Trail, 47th St fountain

Former University Methodist Church, former street fountain

Christie Park

University Playground (including the photo above)

Time marches on, dear Diary; there's a reason I ditched "months" in the titles of the library pages.  I'm working on three fronts:

For part VI of public library hours, I've finished work on Wahkiakum County and started on revising the actual page and on San Juan County.  Cowlitz County, however, is nearly three times as big a job as those two put together, and Skagit County nearly four times.  So we'll see.

For part II of institutional libraries, I now have my list and just need to get through it; as I said in part I, it's a long list.

And I'm also dipping my toes into part I of academic libraries.

Whatever, though, you should hear from me again reasonably soon, dear Diary.  Happy nights and days until then.

Truth and fantasy about park restrooms in winter

Dear Diary,

I've now mapped the park restrooms that were promised to be open in North Seattle last winter:

and then modified that map by what I found in February and in March:

The big circles that are obvious on the map represent differences between what I found and what we were all told last November.  Eight of those differences are restrooms closed that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's spokes-person claimed would be open; and two are restrooms open that she did not claim would be.

1. Little Brook Park.  We were told the unheated wooden box of a restroom this park has would be open this past winter, and to emphasise the point, responsibility for keeping it open was given to both the Northwest and the Northeast parks maintenance crews.  However, someone on one of those crews sensibly enough put a closure sign up instead.  Lake City still needs real park restrooms, which should be in Virgil Flaim Park; it doesn't need jokes about the inadequate room it has instead.
   
2. Jackson Park.  The parks department tends to ignore this park in many ways, including lists of restrooms; in particular, the restrooms there are maintained, opened and closed by employees of a private lessee, not by the parks department.  So this is more an apparent difference than a real one, but still, there's restrooms in a city-owned park that were open this past winter but not in the posted list, so it's still a difference.
3. Sandel Playground.  Both in 2020-2021 and in 2022-2023 I found the restrooms there locked; in both years they were supposed to open.  I think this is a disagreement between the parks department's PR people and the northwest maintenance crew.  I hope they settle it before next winter.
4. Green Lake Park, Bathhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open in winter and summer, but not in spring and fall, so again, I wasn't surprised to find them open despite their omission from the posted list, but it's still a difference.
   
5. Salmon Bay Park.  I'm not sure whether this building has heat, but it doesn't have much room for it, and these restrooms haven't customarily been open in winter.  I'm guessing this lie was meant to appease people in Ballard who want the homeless to have somewhere to go besides the library and the bushes.  Maybe including Ballard's city council member?  Or maybe it was much less than that, just a joke on me, as previously suggested.  Mind, dear Diary, I still don't have a clue why the indoor restrooms with doors that open to the outdoors, in the Ballard Community Center, close each winter, unless it's out of hatred towards homeless people.  But we weren't promised Ballard Community Center last winter, and we were promised Salmon Bay Park.
   
6. Green Lake Park, Shellhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the building they're in is currently behind a construction fence.
7. Ravenna Park, lower restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the men's room has been locked for years, and the women's room was locked too when I went there this past winter.
8. Woodland Park, Citywide Athletics Building ("Rio") restrooms.  These have also been locked for years, and have acquired an impressive amount of graffiti on this subject.  Now, closing restrooms in winter that could be kept open is supposed to enable the parks maintenance crews to clean graffiti up, so I'm not sure why they're neglecting these examples.  Nor am I clear on why the athletes were left without restrooms this past winter, considering that a perfectly reasonable alternative (Woodland Park Cloverleaf) is available a few blocks north, and was opened winter 2020-2021.
9. University Playground.  The restrooms have been closed for years, since the pandemic began and probably since before then.  They've been fenced in, in the recent past; they're now welded shut.  A blatant lie.
10. Gas Works Park.  A little further along than the Green Lake Small Crafts Center (whose restrooms are referred to by the name of the nearby Shellhouse); here it's the place where the building was that's now surrounded by a construction fence.

In the past, I've suggested that the parks department's pathological inability to tell the truth about its winter restrooms resulted from a sorcerer's spell.  This year, there's perhaps a more prosaic explanation.  This past winter, visitors to parks all over southern North Seattle, south of 65th, say, got to experience what park visitors in Lake City experience all the time:  no restrooms.  As many were closed despite claims they'd be open, as were open:  Green Lake Shellhouse, Woodland "Rio", Gas Works, lower Ravenna, and University were all promised but closed; Woodland Pink Palace and 50th, Green Lake 64th, Wallingford and - I presume, not having gotten there myself - Laurelhurst were all promised and open.  Now, something similar happens in West Seattle on a regular basis, and West Seattle typically has more political power in Seattle than southern North Seattle does.  But maybe the parks department didn't like the optics of admitting how far someone needing a restroom would have to walk, in southern North Seattle, so it decorated truth with fantasy.

Or maybe it didn't like admitting how few open restroom locations in North Seattle it was using our tax dollars to support this winter, so it added a few it knew wouldn't be open.  We were promised 25.  We got 18.  (Jackson Park's restrooms aren't supported by tax dollars.)  In 2019-2020, we got 23.  We got 72% of what was promised, and 78% of three years ago.  In my experience, in school, these would usually be passing grades, but they aren't in my current job.  Are they passing grades in parks department jobs?

At least this year, there isn't an agency serving the homeless that relies on the parks department to tell the truth about its own property.  So with any luck, my former peers weren't misled by those lies.  I wonder who else was.

Good night, dear Diary.  I don't know when I'll be back, so have a happy spring, by day and night both.

My February Hikes

Dear Diary,

To start with, I planned to tackle all the parks with restrooms in one region of North Seattle, that is, NE, N and NW, in one day off each.  In reality, on February 19th I visited the majority of NE parks; on February 26, the majority of NW (adding one on the 28th); on March 5 a few in NE and N; on March 12 only Salmon Bay Park; and on March 19 most of N.  (In each region I started in the north, to keep myself from focusing as usual on the closer-together parks further south.)  On March 22 (my day off had switched), I visited the parks of Greenwood and east of there, which were most of what was left, but it was already too late to evaluate their restrooms' winter availability.

In your previous page, dear Diary, I focused on the lists of park restrooms open in winter posted by Christina Hirsch in 2019 and in 2022.  In particular, I noted that of four restrooms or restroom pairs added to the 2022 list in North Seattle, three appeared to be outright lies (University Playground's restroom doors welded shut; Little Brook Park's restroom posted as seasonally closed; Salmon Bay Park's restrooms locked on two visits) and one, at best, a conflict between Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation management and the parks maintenance workers who actually open, clean, do minor repairs on, and close the restrooms, that is, Sandel Playground's restrooms, which now in two winters (2020-2021 and 2022-2023) have been advertised as open but have instead been closed.

However, I found other interesting things on these hikes, including but not limited to more lies, and so plan two other pages to tell you about them, dear Diary.  This is the first, and covers NE and NW.

February 19th

I've now uploaded most of the photos to Google Drive.  For this hike, that means Magnuson Park, Matthews Beach, Little Brook Park, all visited between 1 and 4 pm; then University Playground, Cowen Park, Ravenna Park, Burke-Gilman Playground Park and View Ridge Playfield, between 4 P.M. and 9 P.M.  (The restrooms at Burke-Gilman Playground Park, which I reached at 7:20 P.M., both had visible seasonal closure notices still up; those at View Ridge Playfield, which I reached at 8:04 P.M., stay open all the time, 24/7.  For which I was very grateful by that time, because all the other open restrooms - Magnuson Park's beach restrooms and Matthews Beach's - had been early in the hike.)

I found the street-style fountain near the intersection of the Burke-Gilman Trail and 30th Ave NE not running.  I didn't check the park-style fountain further south.

Other notes:

Magnuson Park

As the previous page noted, without going out of my way re water fountains, I found four that were running, of which three were attached to heated buildings.  The fourth was in Magnuson Park.  It was running strongly:

I was concerned enough about this - cold weather was then forecast - to write to Rachel Schulkin, PR at the parks department.  But I thought there was a real chance that someone in charge at Magnuson Park was doing a controlled experiment, comparing an attached fountain with a free-standing one.  So I told her the fountains should be turned off unless they represented such an experiment.

I think I was worrying too much.  I've told you before, dear Diary, that while homeless I began tracking low temperatures in spreadsheets - a succession of these as the electronic gadgets where I kept them broke or were stolen.  (And as my standards changed.  I originally just listed temperature readings from signs I passed on my way to campus.)  The surviving version goes back to 2019, and I still go to some trouble to keep that spreadsheet up.

Now, 2022 was distinctive compared to the other years I still have, and as best I remember going further back.  I track three thermometers:  one at the roof of the UW's Atmospheric Sciences building, measured every minute by UW personnel; one at Boeing Field, measured every five minutes by the National Weather Service; and one at NOAA's building on the UW campus, a couple blocks south of the Atmospheric Sciences building and much closer to the water, measured every hour also by the National Weather Service.  Historically, my comments on the spreadsheet concerned almost only missed readings at one or another of these.  UW was usually the highest, NOAA often the lowest.  But in 2022, NOAA's readings started going haywire, very often dropping by 8º Fahrenheit for a single reading, sometimes two or three times in 24 hours.  I noted these but only recorded more believable lows.  My complaints about NOAA's readings got ever more baroque as these "swoops" became more frequent and more extreme (for a time they were consistently 11º F in extent).  Finally October 1st to 6th, neither NOAA nor UW gave credible readings; readings at both ranged 11º to 15º F throughout those days.  From October 7th to November 23rd, NOAA was credible, the UW not; but on November 24th, NOAA swooped eight times, and this pattern of frequent swoops making it un-useable as a data source has been its pattern basically ever since, except for a few weeks around New Year's.  On November 28th, the UW came back, and has been steady ever since.  I've since learnt, from my work on the counties, that actually the Weather Service has multiple stations whose temperature readings regularly swoop; I suspect the main brand of thermometer NWS relies on is maybe not up to being used outside for years on end.

Anyway, though, this melange of sources reported a bunch of temperatures in the 20s before February 19 of this year.  November 9th, 2022:  NOAA 29º (Boeing 30º).  November 18th through 20th (both NOAA and Boeing).  December 1st and 2nd, also the 15th and 16th (all Boeing; UW higher).  December 21st through 24th (both UW and Boeing, and going down to 16º).  January 30th, 2023 (both UW, at 29º, and Boeing, at 21º).  So when I found that fountain running on February 19th, one of two things had to be true:  Either it was equal to 16º temperatures, or it was being closely supervised by someone able and willing to turn it off when such temperatures threatened.

So I shouldn't have worried so much.  It looks like Seattle parks could have a lot more running water fountains in typical Seattle winters, although if the explanation is close supervision, that probably doesn't scale up too well.

I didn't find the showers at either Magnuson or Matthews beaches running.

Ravenna Park

Both the 2019 list and the 2022 list said Ravenna Park's lower restrooms were open.  I know from when you began, dear Diary, that the 2019 list was telling the truth.  The 2022 list was not, and I can't imagine why a list that had clearly been actively compiled included the long-term-closed restrooms at Ravenna Park.

February 26th

Again, most of the photos are now at Google Drive, including Carkeek Park, Golden Gardens Park, Soundview Playfield, Loyal Heights Community Center, Salmon Bay Park, Ballard Community Center, Ballard Commons, and also the street water fountain at Greenwood Ave and 85th St, which was near a place where I changed buses, and which I found running very strongly:

Carkeek Park

Carkeek Park is distinctive among the parks of North Seattle with regard to its restrooms:  It's the largest park with only one restroom location.  Jackson Park, the next largest, has only one location for restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and all its restrooms are in one small part of the park, but most of the park is a golf course, which apparently makes that OK.  Otherwise, the next smaller park with only one set of restrooms is Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, one-seventh the size of Carkeek Park.

The reason Carkeek Park can get away with having so few restrooms is partly that most of what's interesting in that park is near those restrooms - the beach, the playground, the picnic shelters.  It's also partly that, like Jackson Park, it used to have park restrooms whose doors open indoors.  But then the Environmental Learning Center at Carkeek Park, which is way off at the other end of the park, much closer to city streets, closed to the public, leaving Carkeek with only one set of restrooms.

So what's new is that one of the ELC buildings has re-opened to the public:

In 2010 it was open Tuesdays through Saturdays, but 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.  So the current schedule is nearly as many hours, though, as in many libraries, it's managed this largely by expanding morning hours.

The front of this building has a lot of glass:

Through this I could see the doors of the restrooms, and could also see a couple of people working.  But they weren't formally open, and I didn't want to bother them (partly because, after all, I hoped to finish NW that day).

Golden Gardens Park

I vaguely remember that the showers here were running, unlike those at Matthews Beach and Magnuson Park.  But my photos don't document this, and it could be a false memory.

February 28th

Gilman Playground

As with Burke-Gilman Playground Park, I got here outside my usual hours limits (6:06 P.M.), but it was OK because there were still closure signs on the doors.  At Google Drive see here.

All for now, dear Diary.  I'll write up the March hikes in the coming days as my schedule allows.  Until then, happy nights and days.

Happy Birthday, Dear Diary! Seattle Parks Lied Again!

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry for neglecting you for so long, and especially given that I left you on a cliffhanger, not knowing whether I'd become homeless over a month ago or had gotten a job at long last.

Well, it was the latter.  I've spent years of my life preparing people's taxes, and got a job by being willing to keep a tax office open the entirety of its open hours.  Which left me only one day off per week.

So I spent those days off hiking, but didn't even get around to uploading the photos to Google Drive timely, much less telling you, Dear Diary, about the hikes, with all the maps and other paraphernalia we've gotten used to.

Now that tax season is over, mirabile dictu, I still have a job, but with considerably fewer hours.  And I wanted to congratulate you on your third birthday, Dear Diary, with a preview of those hikes' results.

I'd told you before about the announcement by Christina Hirsch in November 2022 of which park restrooms would be open this winter.  It's her second such announcement, the first having appeared in 2019.  The 2019 list turned out to be a much better guide to which park restrooms in North Seattle were open during the winter of 2020-2021 than the map the city was then promoting as answering that question.  But by now, things have changed.  The 2022 list omits a few restrooms the 2019 list included:  Ballard Commons (which was fenced closed until March 12 of this year); Cal Anderson Park (sort of:  it's listed this time as having had "portables", but the 2019 list had no such note); Discovery Park's beach restrooms; Green Lake Park's Bathhouse restrooms (which I nevertheless found open).

And it adds a ton of others, eighteen, near as I can count.  Only four of these are in North Seattle, and in my own November 2022 discussion I expressed surprise about three of these.  I didn't find any of the four actually open.

On Sunday, February 19th, at 3:08 P.M., Little Brook Park's restroom (yes, only one) was closed with a seasonal closure sign posted:

At 4:17 P.M. that day, I found University Playground's restrooms not only closed, but welded closed:

On Sunday, February 26th at 6:33 P.M., I found Salmon Bay Park's restrooms closed.  I didn't think they looked like they'd been used recently, but the thing is, park restroom hours are 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. most times of the year, and I was trying, in these hikes, to be extremely fair to Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, by limiting my hikes to 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.  So I went back to Salmon Bay Park on Sunday, March 12th at 5:47 P.M.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, March 5th, I'd reached Sandel Playground at 6:06 P.M., technically outside my limits, but I mean, really.  Of the many lies I caught the parks department in during the winter of 2020-2021, the only one that took Ms. Hirsch's colleague Rachel Schulkin by surprise was that Sandel Playground's restrooms were closed.  They hadn't been in the 2019 list, but in 2020-2021 they were supposed to have been open, and weren't.  The same happened in 2022-2023:

I wasn't able to get back to Sandel Playground before 6 P.M. until Wednesday, March 22nd, and having already found Greenwood Park's restroom, a twin to Little Brook Park's, open that day, was unsurprised to find Sandel Playground's restrooms open too.

Basically, I think none of the four additions in North Seattle was real, and three were outright lies.  The question I had, though, was whether that was Ms. Hirsch's little joke on you, dear Diary, and me, or whether the parks department was really inflating its winter restroom numbers city-wide.  I thought if those four were the only additions, that would be a give-away, but actually there were fourteen other additions, none of which I got a chance to visit.  Dear Diary, you've been visited a lot ever since I signed up at an active job-hunting site, but I'm not sure how many of those visits have been by actual human beings.  But if anyone who reads this can comment on whether restrooms were open this past winter in the following parks, I'd be very grateful:

1. Alki Beach - Was listed only once in 2019, but with three locations in 2022.  So two of 63rd, 57th and Bath House should've been open besides the one that was open then.
2. Alki Beach - The other new one.
3. Beer Sheva Park.
4. Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park.
5. Hiawatha.
6. Magnolia Community Center.  The 2019 list included only Community Centers which had restrooms with doors that open to the outside, which are more obviously park restrooms than other Community Center restrooms.  I don't know that all the Community Centers in the 2022 list have such outside-opening restrooms, though.
7. Montlake Community Center.
8. Mount Baker Park.
9. Pratt Park.  This park's restrooms were definitely under construction when I first visited the place in winter 2021-2022.  It's at least plausible that the old ones didn't have heat while the new ones do.  (It's thoroughly implausible that Cal Anderson Park's restrooms went from having heat to not having it.)
   
10. Queen Anne Bowl.
11. Riverview Playfield.
12. Seward Park Picnic Shelters.
13. South Park Community Center.
14. Volunteer Park Bandstand.

Anyway, parks in North Seattle whose restrooms' openness I didn't check in winter 2022-2023:  I didn't visit Meadowbrook Playfield or Laurelhurst Community Center at all; I didn't visit Ross Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (which Hirsch's lists call Maple Leaf Playground), Dahl Playfield, Licton Springs Park, Greenwood Park, or Sandel Playground, within the hours I'd limited myself to, before the spring openings.  Of these, Laurelhurst, Maple Leaf, Dahl and Sandel were supposed to be open, and I'm guessing the first three of those actually were open, though Maple Leaf is often closed on Sundays both in winter and at other times of year.  Ross, Meadowbrook, Licton Springs and Greenwood weren't supposed to be open, and of those, only Meadowbrook could reasonably have been opened.  (Licton Springs's restrooms, of course, have been torn down.)

I also in November called attention to Matthews Beach, which is consistently supposed to have open restrooms in winter, but I never found them so in 2020-2021.  I did find them open this time.  They're two single-stall all-gender rooms, one of which had been boarded over in 2020-2021; both were open on February 19th.

This time I only paid attention to water fountains conveniently near restrooms, but also to the street fountains.  I found four park water fountains running.  Three were attached to heated buildings - one of the golf buildings at Jackson Park, the cloverleaf restrooms of Woodland Park and the beach restrooms of Magnuson Park.  The fourth is free-standing, and I'm frankly amazed it was still running on February 19th, at Magnuson Park's central restrooms.  I don't remember what I found re street fountains - I think, one running, one not, but no idea which.

All for now, and pedants would say I've missed your birthday anyhow, but here's to a good year ahead for you, dear Diary!