A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part III: Maps and comments

Dear Diary,

Here I am again, a little sooner than expected, with maps.  And also opinion.

Some history and maps

I said in the first part that North Seattle has not previously had so many bus stop demolitions at once.  How can I know this?

I can't, really, but I can make a pretty good guess, and it's by comparing maps.  I have cell phone photos of the North Seattle parts of dozens of transit maps, and out of those, I picked the following to compare in detail, using the eleven regions mentioned elsewhere recently as a heuristic:  1958, 1965, 1973, 1980, 1988, 1995, 2002, 2016 and 2023.  In general, I looked for changes either of the form of a longish street appearing or disappearing, or a longish street getting or losing a gap.

On that basis, from 1958 to 2000, four times, significant blocks of streets lost transit in North Seattle.  Twice in the 2010s, two blocks of streets lost transit.  Now four are doing so at once.  I don't like this upward trend.

The first cut was of one of the briefest-lived of these routes.  In the 1980 and 1983 bus maps, the route 316 was shown as following 1st Ave NE from Northgate to the city limits.  I don't have any maps between 1983 and 1988, so don't know how many years that route actually lasted, but anyway, here's the map.

The second cut is of an oddity of all maps I have from 1983 to 1991.  From the 1940s on, there's been an east-west route following what is now N 45th St.  But during the 1980s, there was another following N and NE 50th St.  It went from Stone Way N to 20th Ave NE, and it was usually numbered 46.

The third and fourth are only one year apart.  The route 25, one of the old ones, had from 1965 or earlier to 1997 a turn-around that led it up 37th Ave NE in Lake City to the city limits.  Then the 25 went away, and so did 37th Ave NE as a bus route:

The route 6, another old one, was the Aurora Ave N bus, but only up to Green Lake, which it wrapped around, coming out on Stone Way N, and staying there all the way to N 40th St.  It died in 1998.

After that, the quiet before the storm.

In 1973 appeared what I called for long ago, a bus up Seaview Ave NW.  It only reached Shilshole Marina.  In 1977 it was extended up to Golden Gardens Park, but with a note on the map itself reading "Summer only".  The note was dropped by 1979.  English Wikipedia documents that before this route (also numbered 46, most of the time) died, it was a commuter bus only, when it should, by then, have been a summer fun bus only.  No wonder it died, between 2010 and 2012.

Also between 2010 and 2012, something much more trivial, except that it was an east-west route across Maple Leaf Hill.  There've always been buses between 25th Ave NE and Lake City Way NE, but from 1999 to 2010 there were also buses between Banner Way NE and Lake City Way NE, so with one transfer one could save a lot of energy ascending or descending the hill.  But then the bus routes on the hill changed, and that went away.

Four years later, in 2016, two older routes were gone.  When the route 48 was split, that route stopped going up 15th Ave NE from NE 45th to NE 65th streets, as it had done since 1999.

A loop in Laurelhurst had been served by buses since 1941, if not earlier, but was removed in March 2016.

So it's not as though bus stops had never been removed before in North Seattle.  But please, dear Diary, compare even the biggest of those above, Seaview and the Laurelhurst loop, with what's coming up:

I assume much more drastic things have happened elsewhere since the light rail opened up, but assuming that's true, I'm baffled that North Seattle was spared for so long.  If anyone who reads this can tell me why, I'll be interested to hear.

Ridership numbers:  A case study

Early in my work on this page, I contacted what I was told was the PR e-mail address for Metro, and reached a guy named Al Sanders.  I asked him for the kind of historical info I've wound up piecing together myself, but also took for granted that he had a press kit all worked up, full of ridership numbers to show that wiping out a dozen North Seattle bus routes, and four long stretches of bus stops, was really the best of all possible things to do.

Well, he never actually got back to me with the history, but he was plainly more confused by my openness to the ridership numbers, which he said would be a lot of work for him.  I figured they'd probably vouch for Metro's case, and so he'd have them handy to feed to reporters.  Naïve of me, I expect.

Thing is, I learnt years ago that ridership numbers can be manipulated, and so aren't trustworthy.

When I moved into my present abode, the 26 was still running.  Or anyway limping.  It promised me two destinations of interest to me, the North Transfer Station and downtown.  But after I'd twice waited over an hour for a bus - at the time they were supposed to be half an hour apart - I gave up.  I usually walked to the transfer station; the route 62, a few blocks away, stops near there too, but I resented being manipulated into increasing the ridership of the less convenient bus.  The 62, of course, was utterly reliable at this time.  I could hardly help inferring that that was because, every time a 62 driver was absent, a 26 driver filled in.  (They may have volunteered.  The 26 route had several of the preposterous turns that make the 20 route more exciting than one really wants a bus to be.  But I still resented being manipulated.)

My first job since becoming housed was at the south end of downtown, and obviously best reached by light rail.  But my second, this is now winter 2023, was more convenient to reach by bus.  And so I learnt that the 20 was more frequent than the 26 had been, but was no more reliable.  More precisely, it was usually on time morning rush hours, but prone to disappearing entirely in the evenings.  Obviously Metro was still treating the Latona bus as a source of labour on other, more important, routes.

While I was working at this job there were rumblings that the 20 could be deleted, and of a survey that everyone should fill out.  I was working 60 hours per week and couldn't be bothered.  I'm pretty sure the survey I actually did fill out, months later, was a different one.  It had the effrontery to ask me, as its only question, what I thought the best feature of the replacement route 61 would be.  My answer?  "When the 20 is gone, Metro will still have a whipping boy bus route, because it'll have the 61."

In September 2023, the updated schedules were advertised as representing Metro adapting to the situation rather than making promises it couldn't keep.  And, in fact, I've found the 20 more reliable, though not actually reliable, this past summer, when it's connected four places I care about - my house, UW, North Seattle College, and Northgate.  But of course Metro had already decided, before September 2023, that the route was doomed.

So yes, I asked for ridership numbers.  I was never out to be the squeaky wheel, which is why I've waited so very late to write about this, and I figured reporting them here would make it clear that Metro had no alternative.  And in fact, in researching this series, I've reluctantly concluded that in some meaningful sense, Metro really did have no alternative.  The people at the Seattle Transit Blog point out that coverage and ridership actually conflict.  Every time a bus is run down Seaview, that's one less bus available for, say, the route 5.  In the real world, transit agencies have to focus on both, but in our particular real space and time right now, Metro has spent years trying to maintain coverage while it waits to see what the new normal will really be like, and now has to return to retrenching in the interests of ridership.

I just wish Metro hadn't considered it necessary, in order to do that, to tell me that my house isn't a destination it finds worth serving.  I think a proper response to that is to try, as best I can, to celebrate the bus stops it's about to destroy.

A Requiem for Seventy-Seven Bus Stops, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

I normally introduce you as being about "public amenities".  Although my main focus is running water for homeless people, and parks and libraries both supply running water to homeless people, I've written in you about parks that don't supply running water - in fact, am documenting my current water fountain hikes with pages titled after such parks.  Well, buses don't supply running water either, and although a bus helped enormously when I desperately needed running water Saturday morning, that would've been a much trickier negotiation indeed if I'd been pushing a cart, as I did in my last years of homelessness to date.  But buses are public amenities.  And considering that two of your first pages, currently enjoying a surprising surge in popularity, are subtitled "Things We've Lost", I don't think talking about things we're about to lose, specifically a whole lot of bus stops, is all that out of place here.

Another thing to consider:  dear Diary, you probably aren't familiar with much of the terminology this series will draw on.  Please do what I assume you've already done with other terminology I've written in you, and look it up in English Wikipedia and other such sites that I assume you're on good terms with.  I don't think any humans who might read your pages will find any unfamiliar words; I'm sorry, though, to have to assign you what amounts to homework so you can understand what you're telling those people.

Yet another thing to consider:  I've been working on this series for weeks, and one of the first things I learned is that the upcoming cuts to bus service in North Seattle are the biggest since bus service here began.  It's not a trivial story, and I've been surprised that nobody else is talking about it, content to settle for the razzle-dazzle of new light rail stops instead.  But today I decided to do some comparisons, and found that West Seattle, of all places (it's nowhere near present light rail), has seen similar cuts in the past decade.  (Key route numbers:  35, 37.)  It looks like North Seattle is simply late to the bus-stop demolition party, and maybe that's why nobody thinks it's worth talking about.

Let's start with that:  routes and bus stops.

Bus routes and bus stops

Perhaps the first time I noticed Erica C. Barnett, now of PubliCola, as a writer, was a story she wrote for The Stranger in 2009, complaining that King County Metro, which runs the local buses around here, was privileging emotional appeals over data, more or less.  I think my life story is actually an excellent illustration of problems with technocracy, but I'm still enough a man of my generation to find great emotional appeal in ideas like "data-driven".  So one thing in particular stuck with me about that story, her hostility to "squeaky wheel"s.  So I don't want to be one here.

The thing is, though, that I'd already internalised, from living where I now do, a core difference between bus routes and bus stops.  Let's say that a travel route in general is defined by where it stops, in what order.  Buses' routes are relatively inflexible as travel routes go - certainly less flexible than my hikes, for example.  But actually, this can vary.  King County Metro currently operates two services, Dial-A-Ride Transit (DART), and an app-based taxi service (Flex), both of which offer more flexibility than Metro's standard buses.  Still, the buses of concern to me in my daily life are pretty inflexible.

So it's possible for me to turn that definition around:  Bus routes are defined by which bus stops they visit, in which order.  Bus stops are the points of departure and of arrival, the starts and destinations, and routes are simply ways to connect them.  Bus stops don't have their own romance, but Bus Stop is a romance, albeit one now troubling, while Busman's Honeymoon is a murder mystery.  Railfans are right about this much:  there's no such thing as a busfan.  But bus stops, as gates of entry to transit systems whose limits are only hazily known to most of their users, have a minimal degree of mystery that partly makes up for their prosaic components and even more prosaic usual uses.

Concretely, I started this, more or less, with history, because I've already lived here long enough to know some of that history.  And it turns out that routes are much more flexible than bus stops, as one might expect, since the physicality of bus stops is much more, um, concrete, than that of bus routes.  The route currently numbered 5, the Greenwood bus, has borne that number since the early 1940s, but the route itself is decades older, built for streetcars in 1906 to 1909.  On the other hand, the route I live near has only had its number for three years, a shorter time than I've lived near it, but there have been stops near where I now live for at least ninety years.  This kind of thing isn't at all atypical.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days mostly photographing bus stops that will soon vanish.  They deserve that much.

However, the next part is about the routes being deleted or cut, because they're how I found out where to look for those bus stops.  Happy minutes, I hope, until I can write that part in you, dear Diary.

Silence ending

Dear Diary,

It's a long time since I've written anything in you, and I've actually taken to putting an ending date of 2023 into my references to you on my resumes.  But as it turns out, I have things to say, and separately, want to go hiking again.  So here goes.

About a month after I last wrote in you, I felt I was finally concentrating enough on job-hunting.  So I filed for unemployment compensation, as it turned out, not long before my eligibility would've run out.  But at the same time, I also applied to North Seattle College's accounting program.  This has occasioned much confusion on the state's Department of Employment Security's part, and very little confusion on NSC's part, but anyway, it has also staved off renewed homelessness, by virtue of an incredibly patient landlord, some unemployment money, and the magic of financial aid.

But this also means I have basically no time to do anything worth telling you about, dear Diary, during each quarter; and I'm trying to complete a degree in six quarters.  So I certainly won't be back at anything like the pace of 2020 or 2021, nor even, really, of 2022 or 2023, before I hope to graduate, in December 2025.  In particular, the months of library hours research and writing, October and April, are off the table until then, although I fear the things that worried me about library hours in October 2023 are going to be even worse by October 2026.

However, between quarters, it's a different story.  My first quarter ended two weeks ago, and although I haven't been hiking much yet, and not for you at all, that's about to change.  I have three pages planned for this break, which continues three more weeks.  One will be about your main topic, park restrooms and water fountains in North Seattle; I hope finally to just do the "baseline" summer hike I've talked about for years, a boring account of what's working, with which to compare winters and other interruptions. [1]  One will be about a library.  And one will be about something completely different.  So, dear Diary, wait another week or so, and you'll have a few new pages, and I'll have to revise my resumes.

As to how well I can write your pages most specifically concerned with homelessness, now that I'm spending immense effort on a plan to avoid that status going forward, I just don't know.  I probably won't really be able to write that kind of page well, but until I get to writing one, won't know how much effect that'll have.  None of this break's planned pages are all that homelessness-specific.

Anyway, until we meet again, happy days and happy nights.

[1] I realise park restrooms are no longer of much interest to my fellow humans.  I think it's worth continuing to pay attention to them, and particularly in winter, because I think it's quite possible that the next respiratory pandemic will not politely wait to manifest until July of whatever year.  So it's fortunate that my two long breaks, while this continues, will be in August-September and December.

More silence, but probably not for too long

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry I've been silent for so long.   It dawned on me that trying to revise part VI of the public library hours page, I was doing immense amounts of work without much way to catch mistakes, and not getting enough readers to justify it.  I thought about hiking, and even had a ready-made target in the dashboard the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has about restroom and water fountain availability, which spent the entire winter assuring everyone that most water fountains were still on.  Well, the parks department seems to have noticed, and that water fountain page itself isn't currently available.  But I talked myself out of hiking because I couldn't afford newspapers with which to date the photos.

Last fall I finished at long last the work on my storage unit that had been waiting since I got housed, boxing everything up.  I also got most of my DVDs and cloth - not just clothing but also pillows, towels, sheets, etc. - out of storage.  Most of my translations of books written more than a millennium ago.  Most of my business papers.  Most of my own writing on paper.  So I've felt more fully housed, more fully connected to who I'd been before 2012, than at any time since that year.

And I've had other things to do.  Such as job hunting.  But the evidence is getting pretty overwhelming that I can't assume I'll ever be employed again, which in turn means I can probably expect another long-term, possibly permanent, bout of homelessness.

Also, in recent months I've been unable to read much news, so maybe that's skewing my priorities.  After months of not feeling much outrage on behalf of those still homeless, I wasn't sure I still had it in me to write in you, dear Diary.  But it's a safe bet that if I become homeless myself again soon, that'll all reverse pretty quickly.  Especially if the transition back to the streets turns out as badly as it looks like it might, and leaves me for the first time homeless without storage.

We'll see.  Please don't expect me to tell you much in the near future, dear Diary, but maybe later this year; we'll just have to wait and see.  Happy days and nights until then.

Some changes, Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

Before I get to today's hike (which was actually mostly on buses), I should tell you a few things that have happened these past few months I've been neglecting you.

Most importantly, your next page, dear Diary, will contain the first photos I've taken for you on a phone I own myself.  From 2017, that is, before you were born, dear Diary, until this past weekend, I've only had phones supported by my eldest brother.  First, an LG phone with which I was very happy, but which was stolen early in your life, dear Diary.  So most of the photos I've taken for you, and most of the pages I wrote on either phone, were on a Samsung phone I was much less happy with.

However, finally last week Samsung put its foot down, demanding my obedience, and meanwhile denying me the chance to use or even charge the phone.  Well, I still have some money left from last spring's work, and I knew my brother would retire next year, so that choice was pretty easy.  Bizarrely, once I got home from replacing it, the Samsung phone started working again.  But anyway, now (having learnt, to my sorrow, that LG no longer make cell phones) I have a OnePlus phone on which I'm reserving judgement, but they'd have to go pretty far to get me as mad as Samsung did.

So, dear Diary, you owe a lot to my brother, and anyone else who reads your pages owes in proportion to whatever they get out of those pages, too.

Anyway.  Speaking of photos...  I've really had exceptionally bad luck with technology this summer.  About a month ago, something posing as an update wiped out my Ubuntu Linux installation's ability to use a graphical interface, including all the software that couldn't be used without the interface.  (What I saw before the crash was that it was bragging about deleting my office software, LibreOffice.)  Well, I was able, using just the command line, copy all my files to my long-neglected backup drive, so once I got Debian Linux installed, I figured my problems were over.  This has turned out not to be true.  

First, I now have some kind of crippleware version of Debian, which won't let me use any keyboard but the Roman script one, won't let me escape it into Windows (not that I like to spend time in Windows, but it's profoundly annoying not to have the option, to be reminded every time I start the computer that this Linux version thinks it owns me, rather than the reverse), and in general reminds me daily that because I'm not a Unix wizard, I don't have any rights with respect to it.

Second, however, none of that is as important to you, dear Diary, as something else, an entirely unrelated consequence of the crash which I only discovered last week.  Turns out the crash didn't just wipe out graphics-dependent software, it also wiped out graphics-dependent data, such as, most obviously, photos.  Specifically, photos for you.  (It seems to have been crazy selective.  No maps were damaged, for example.)  The only photos it cared to leave are those I took this year, 2023.  So, in particular, lots of photos of downtown Seattle are now gone, as well as those I took for the never-written pages about Tacoma, and any number of others.

We'll just see what happens, but anyway, there have been some reasons other than my laziness why I haven't written any pages in you for a long time, dear Diary.  After tonight, I'll try to do better in the short term, and then we'll see about the longer term.  See you again soon, though.

Delay

Dear Diary,

I must apologise.  I didn't hike for you during this past weekend, which was apparently blessed with beautiful weather.

For much of last week, I waited for "Away from the Manger", which was the argument the previous two (or four) pages were meant to support, to get read by what I thought enough people before going on.  I thought I was making a fairly important point, and set pretty modest bars which it still took until Friday the 7th to meet, before I would send that page any further from the limelight than it already was.  I don't know how many of your readers, dear Diary, read you for photos of parks, but you and I know that you're about more than that.

Unfortunately, on Friday the 7th I missed work for the first time since becoming housed, because work has fairly strict standards for illness, and I was coming down with what I still hope is a cold.  But to make matters still better, on Sunday I learnt that I've also definitely been exposed to COVID-19 recently.  On the whole, I expect to miss work Monday too, or I wouldn't be writing in you this late.  I found it necessary, despite relatively balmy weather tonight, to wear the heavy coat I'm grateful for just to go get groceries.

The contrast between my situation and a front page story Sunday is intentional, but not fictional.  I really do have a cold, if not worse, and a woman had much worse while still living on the streets.

I still have a couple of things I can work on at home for you, dear Diary, as I recover, and navigate what the pandemic demands of these circumstances.  What I worked on during what I hope was the sleepiest phase was a spreadsheet of my favourite music from Korean TV dramas, which I'd put aside in July because I'd reached the time-consuming part of the job.  Well, it took three tired days, but that part's done.  Since this spreadsheet includes YouTube references, it'll probably go out of date pretty quickly, quicker than I can hope to build my planned K-drama blog, so I'll put the spreadsheet into my Google Drive and make it public once it's caught up (sometime in February, according to my current plans).  Meanwhile, I hope I'll be awake enough tomorrow, and any other days I might miss, to work on the at-home tasks for you, dear Diary, and it looks like next weekend might also be dry enough to hike.  Until then, good nights and good days.

 

Expected and Unexpected News from the University District

Dear Diary,

Today I got off work early, and although the weather tempted me to go hiking for you, I resisted, because I don't know when I'll next get a chance to go to the University of Washington's libraries.  I had three purposes there - one for you, which I accomplished (I'm now fairly confident that Roanoke Park really hasn't ever had restrooms); one for my writing about Korean dramas, which I accomplished (reading two standard references on Taoism in Korea); and one for my interest in science fiction, which I didn't accomplish (copying a book, my inability to read which is holding up yet another writing project).  C'est la vie.

Anyway, on the way there, I went to see the current status of the land where the beautiful old University Temple, formerly home to many good causes, including the Roots young adult shelter, which has moved, and the Urban Rest Stop's U-District location, piggybacking off of Roots's showers - anyway, the current status of the land where all that had stood.

 

On my way out of the libraries, it occurred to me that that photo might not be clear enough, so I decided to see if I could figure out where the water fountain used to be, and take a photo from there.  Actually, not only the structure that housed the water fountain, but some of its pipes, are still there (look in the bottom foreground).  I choose to take that as a physical sign that the new building will make room for good causes as well.  Anyway, the photo:

And, of course, dear Diary, you know me well enough to know what I did when I went home.

The Urban Rest Stop now admits that it no longer has a location there.  This change came sometime between May and September of this year:

Unfortunately, the map offered by the City of Seattle's Department of Human Services Homelessness Strategy and Investments Division, ostensibly of restrooms available to homeless and other people during the epidemic, the map I spent much of last winter hiking to check, has somehow not yet figured out that demolished restrooms aren't open:

Today, I seriously have no idea whether my current job will end tomorrow (one very possible consequence of the reason I left early today) or will become permanent.  Any people still working in that division are in somewhat similar situations, and I don't envy them, but I wish they had the grace to leave their current jobs without lying the way they did while those jobs were stable.

After taking the second photo up top, I looked at the University Bookstore for the novel I hadn't been able to copy at Suzzallo.  Being nearly ten years old, it wasn't there, of course, but as I browsed the remainders tables something flew out at me.  It's a translation of a novel from Swedish, and its title is what caught my attention:  How to Fall in Love with a Man Who Lives in a Bush.  (It's available, obviously, among the University Bookstore's remainders, but also in three formats from the Seattle Public Library.)  No, dear Diary, there isn't some strange twisted meaning to that title, it's actually a romance whose male lead is homeless:

Wikipedia on the author makes this even stranger:  Turns out she wrote what she knew, because she, an actress of all people, actually did marry a man who was homeless when they met.

I have no idea how long I'll be writing you, dear Diary, nor with how much intensity, but this gives me at least a little hope that someday I might not be hiking alone for you.  But that's how I intend to spend much of this weekend (if not, um, sooner), hiking alone, trying to finish visiting the downtown parks by day and then telling you about it.  Until then, good night and good days.

Bitter Lake Playfield and Licton Springs Park Today - and Tonight

Dear Diary,

Today I had to go to Home Depot to deal with some problems left (I hope) by a departing housemate (the topic of the public good has been on my mind a whole lot lately), and decided to extend the trip to include Bitter Lake Playfield, which isn't especially close to Home Depot, but also isn't especially close to anywhere else I go either, so why not?  While there I tried to talk myself into going to all three of the Greenwood parks with plumbing, but finally settled for going only to the one some of whose plumbing was closed earlier this year.  So that's why those two parks today.

I took the scenic route to Aurora, meaning I went through Woodland Park.  Still no sweep, still no sweep announcements.  I don't get it, but maybe some official drove up to a sign I saw there:

and actually paid attention.  (Maybe the photo isn't as clear as I intended:  someone has added to the base sign "IN THE NAME OF LOVE".)  Or maybe they're waiting for the rain to return, to make the sweep even more cruel.  I don't know.

Anyway, the other two parks present very different (though, underneath, related) pictures, so I should probably separate them, but before I do:  Most of the photos of Bitter Lake, and one of the photos of Licton Springs, are at the Google Drive folders (Bitter Lake, Licton Springs), so are securely dated.

Bitter Lake Playfield

Last time I was at this park, I found a running water fountain near the playground that I hadn't previously noticed.  This was during the second year's part of what I've called the Durkan Drought; near as I can figure, that fountain was replacing fountains at Northacres Park that had been running during the first year's part, but not the second.

I also found what looked like metal thieves' work on one of the two bowls of the water fountain I'd already known about, and concluded that neither bowl was likely to run soon, because I assumed their plumbing must be so linked that one running while the other lacked a spout and piping would produce flooding.

Well, turns out the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has standardised on a smarter design of water fountain than that.  Look, dear Diary:

This is a good thing, too, because both the non-running bowl of this fountain, and the fountain near the playground, have clogged drains, so their bowls are full.  (The lower of the above shots got my newspaper section wet.)  Here's the playground fountain:

I also found the restrooms open.  Now, they'd been open in spring, so this wasn't a great surprise, but there are some issues about those restrooms.  First, last autumn they weren't open because of construction delays, and I found one of the "sanican" substitutes burnt (or maybe that was winter?), just as I found such a "sanican" substitute burnt at University Playground yesterday.  Second, ever since last summer I've suspected these restrooms of being open 24 hours, on two grounds:  people there at the time said they were, and they were open far too late on that visit to be locked by parks department personnel.  (But locking them could still be left for hired security guys, as at Green Lake Park last winter.)

So I went back to Bitter Lake Playfield tonight.  I wasn't there noticeably later than on my first visit over a year ago, so this still isn't conclusive, but I found them open later than 9 P.M. again.

And yes, I realise those photos don't prove anything here, but they're both at the Google Drive folder, where their times survive uploading.

Anyway, that brings me to the third issue about Bitter Lake Playfield's restrooms.  They'll probably be under construction again next year.  It looks like designs are being finalised for a complete rebuild of the playground and restroom building (that's what the large sign on the women's room gate is about).  The existing building was closed last winter, though for "historic low usage" rather than unreadiness for Seattle's winters, so will probably be closed this winter, and then under construction until that's done.  Which means the next time I can afford to visit the park at 2 A.M. or some other such decisive time is probably going to be too late.

The reason the "sanican" was burnt last autumn or winter, I assume, has to do with the reason "historic low usage" was such a stupid criterion then:  There's been a huge and famous homeless camp at that Playfield throughout the pandemic.  Except that when the parks department began to flex some muscle to get them to move, many moved to the school property next door; and when sweeps of other parks really got going, still more did.  A sweep of Bitter Lake has been long postponed because our wonderful mayor declared that encampments on school property were the exclusive business of the Seattle Public Schools, which neither have staff to deal with this kind of thing at all, nor want to be demonised for sweeps.  Another issue, though, was that the border between the Playfield and the School seems not to have been clear.  That, at least, someone has decided is settled:

And today, for the first time in my experience, all the tents were on the School side of that fence.

But they had left some parting gifts behind on the Playfield side:

This is clearly homeless-encampment trash - it includes several mattress-like items - and it struck me as, on top of the burnt "sanican", more than a little mean-spirited.  The people who will have to clean it up are not the people who make decisions the campers object to, and the decision-makers are unlikely even to notice the .1% increase in parks trash costs that results.

Anyway, Bitter Lake for today represents a very different scenario from Licton Springs, though both sets of restrooms would normally close in November (and for the same reason).

Licton Springs Park

Most of the photos I took of Licton Springs aren't at the Google Drive folder, and that doesn't matter, because my news here is old and, apparently, to everyone but me, unimportant.

The Seattle Fire Department announced on September 4th, on Twitter, a fire under control at Licton Springs Park, in a "cinder block type structure".  Near as I can tell, nobody else, not even some neighbourhood blog, has reported on this fire.

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation already knows how to deal with this kind of thing, from years of practice at Magnuson Park:

Unfortunately, here the water fountains, which ran during both phases of the Durkan Drought, are attached to the restroom building, so are inside the fence.

One commenter on Twitter wondered if the fire was started by a "vagrant's campfire".  This would not be an unreasonable thing to wonder, in the abstract, but having seen the results even two months later, I doubt it.  This fire burned hot, and it created a whole lot of ash, which has drifted all over the place.  I think at some level this fire was arson, whether in complaint against the closure of the restrooms, or as a way of preventing future homeless camps there like the slobs whose obnoxiously messy occupation in 2020 (largely on top of federally protected wetlands) was what led the parks department to close the restrooms this spring in the first place.  Arson is traditionally for profit, and I don't see that here, but this fire has in common with arson that - at least in my uninformed opinion - it was planned.

More photos trying, and probably failing, to back these claims up:

At any rate, now I see that University Playground's restrooms still have at least one step to go before demolition:  a fence.

I would not be optimistic about any specific fenced-in restroom, however.  The tower building at Magnuson Park has, after all, been fenced in for five years, and is considerably more urgent, from any sensible parks perspective, to fix, than either Licton Springs's or University's restrooms.  The boarded-up doors at Woodland Park's "Rio" (Citywide Athletic Building) men's room and one of the single-user stalls at Matthews Park probably represent smaller versions of the same 'We might get to it someday, if funds allow' situation.

Some meta notes

I've been finding that photo-heavy Blogspot pages - specifically, yours, dear Diary, and Cliff Mass's weather blog's - are essentially impossible for me to load with all their photos at the same time, at the moment.  This appears not to represent my house's Wi-Fi choking (I get similar results on my phone without Wi-Fi), so I suspect Blogspot itself is unable, at present, to deal properly with blogs like this one.  My apologies to anyone else affected by this.  I still prefer to show you the photos, dear Diary, because I don't have much storage on the phone with which I take them - which has now taken to reminding me, with most shots, that it's taking time to store them - and because I assume sooner or later Blogspot will take care of the problem.

Anyway, I spent so much time today in North Seattle that I can't even finish the other page(s) meant to back up my claims about throwing amenities away, let alone the pages actually explaining those claims, before the election.  At some level, this is right:  your remit, after all, dear Diary, is North Seattle parks, and that other page isn't even about North Seattle.  But I can't actually keep spending entire weekends on you anyway, and you should learn the value of solidarity, so I hope you'll bear with me that this is the second-last "today" post for some time to come.  Until the last, good night and good days, dear Diary.

Anyone who wants references to the events discussed above in the parks mentioned, and is reading on a phone, should please ask his or her browser to behave like a desktop one, and then re-load this page.  Desktop readers get access to "labels", what everyone else in the world calls tags, which enable pulling up other pages with related topics.  I don't have time tonight to do all the links I did with last night's post (for which I'd hoped for far more readers than it looks like it'll get).

On the off chance that anyone reads this page who cares how I plan to vote:  for the big four races that have led The Seattle Times to wax apocalyptic, and have led to so much advertising advocacy, a straight left ticket - I want to see whether the progressive project can succeed under even optimum conditions, before changing my basic allegiance, and also at least two of the progressives' opponents have openly broken laws recently - even though all the opponents, but none of the progressives, have sent me mail; but the remaining races, I now have very little time to decide about.  

Anyway, dear Diary, don't expect such late posts in future:  the troublesome housemate who left was my next door and only real neighbour in this house, but his room won't stay empty forever, and one major reason I'm typing so late is that I also had to do laundry almost so late (it finished before this page!), after that second visit today to Bitter Lake, and might as well violate quiet time some more, circumstances I'll try not to let happen again.  So again, good night.