The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VIIC: Northeast (eastern group)

Dear Diary,

Wow, it's good to be done hiking downtown to appreciate parks.  I still have to hike downtown for two other reasons - artist credits and some carelessness about water fountains in some of my earlier hikes, plus the changing seasons affecting those.  But I don't have to wear rose-coloured glasses any more, which should make it easier to see where I'm going.

Anyway, the parks discussed in this page have in common that they belong to a neighbourhood that's more than a little self-aware, and sees itself as transitional in relation to downtown, if not entirely outside it, kind of like Chinatown and Japantown in the first area I covered, the southeast.

As before, I'm going smallest to largest.  However, two pairs of parks, I'm unable to determine the relative sizes of, so have just put them in the order I visited them Sunday.

Cascade People's Center

This is the one I visited for the first time last night.  According to the King County Parcel Viewer, the entire block between Minor and Pontius Avenues N, and Harrison and Thomas Streets, belongs to the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  But I'm treating it in three parts.

The smallest of those is a building near the southeastern corner of the block.  Its website invites the right sorts of groups to rent it, but it's also the home to a bunch of activities, in which, near as I can tell from the ample signage on the doorway and elsewhere in the park, the YMCA takes the lead.  And this is also a building the nearby P-Patch's gardeners use to organise a food bank that then distributes the food in the nearby park.  The building has a plumbing system, but near as I can tell, doesn't have regular hours.  It seems to have opened in the late 1990s.

Neither of my night photos of its doorway really caught much of the total building presentation, which includes the name in big letters and a bunch of organisations' logos, above the door.  This is the less bad photo.

Cascade P-Patch

This is, like many P-patches, on parks department property.  It differs from most P-patches in two important ways.  One, it looks less orderly.  Of course, as in all P-patches, the gardeners here each have their own space to keep, but it finds ways to keep that from being the main impression at least this visitor got:

Two, it has, I think, something to do with the "Giving Garden" around which the food bank is organised.  I suspect many P-patches have some kind of relationship with local charities, but that seems to be considerably more organised and prominent at this one.  That said, I won't pretend to be an expert.  I did talk with some of the people setting up the food bank on Sunday, but not about what they were doing; sorry, dear Diary.  The P-patch's website says it opened in 1996.

Next up is the first of the pairs whose relative sizes I can't judge.

(Seattle City Light) Denny Substation

This is a partly-triangular space which, when Seattle City Light was building a Downtown Substation (the name given in Seattle's 2020 real property report), they decided to offer as a park in order to get enough credit to block a street, or some such.  Seattle Public Utilities parkifies its properties very often, and I've noted SCL doing good deeds like tiny house villages, but this is the first case I've encountered of SCL parkifying.  Anyway, this triangle is along Minor Ave between John St and Denny Way, with the broader part to the north, although that broader part doesn't actually reach John.

The main thing Denny Substation is about is an off-leash dog area.

Its major amenities are benches and bulletin boards, and these are carefully allocated, one each within and outside the dog area, but the non-dog area is so split up, the grassiest part dominated by an artwork I found ugly, that really, there isn't much reason for someone who doesn't keep dogs to visit the place.

Denny Substation opened in 2018.  As I understand it, the "temporary" off-leash area at Denny Park was meant to tide dog keepers over until Denny Substation opened.  I wonder how many more years it'll be before "temporary" gets removed from the name.  Not that I object to the off-leash area at Denny Park; what bothers me is the takeover of all of Regrade Park.

(Onni) Seattle Times Park

The Seattle Times seems to have tried several ways to parlay its headquarters area into South Lake Union real estate money, and the way that worked was giving up and selling, in 2013, to the Onni Group.  The latter wanted to build on the park, but local opposition sank that, and their revised plans actually call for them to expand it.  However, at present, Seattle Times Park, which is a small area on the southwest corner of Fairview Ave N and John St, isn't a park at all.

Those tents aren't homeless people's; they're open on their short ends, which homeless people's tents wouldn't be, and I assume they're there to protect people looking at blueprints and such.  While Onni is a-building, Seattle Times Park is a construction staging area, and I think I also saw signs of work on the park itself.

As I walked away on John (unaware that it doesn't go through to Denny Park), I noticed something very odd.

I mean, yes, it's odd to see hand-washing stations associated with construction workers' "sanican"s, odd in a good way, but it's much, much odder to see fourteen "sanican"s in a row like that, outside the construction fence, and unlocked.  It dawned on me that Onni was doing a surge, comparable to those in Iraq and Afghanistan years back.  Vandalising one lonely "sanican" might be exciting, but vandalising a row of fourteen of the things would be way too much like work.  There will never be enough homeless people there at one time to fill all fourteen, so Onni's workers won't be crowded out.  And so forth.  Dear Diary, I will recur to the surge metaphor in future pages, and regardless of my dislike for "sanican"s, I was thrilled to see such a clear demonstration of the power of surges.

The next two parks, I'm also unable to estimate the relative areas of, though both are definitely bigger than the two I've just discussed.  This first one is barely bigger than one acre.  I visited these two before the two above.

(SPU) Capitol Hill Water Quality Project

Trust SPU to find a boring name for something nice they do.  This is a project to keep Capitol Hill's stormwater from pouring unfiltered into Lake Union.  Instead it goes through bioswales laid out along Pontius and Yale Avenues N between Republican and Thomas Streets.  You can read all about it here (PDF), dear Diary.

Anyway, these are very pretty bioswales, created by removing a parking lane, and widening the sidewalks in the process.  On Pontius, with explanatory sign in front:

And on Yale:

It's recent, but although lots of people brag about it being nationally known (apparently CNN did a story), nobody seems to want to say when it opened, if "opened" is even the right word.

(REI) Unnamed park

This is the only park in this set with which I have a little bit of real history.  When I started shopping for sleeping bags, early in my homelessness in Seattle, I figured REI was the place to go.  Their prices soon convinced me otherwise; I ended up getting all my sleeping bags from a QFC, which however no longer wants to sell them, so I may have to go back to REI after all.  Anyway, I was befuddled by the presence of all this Nature outside a downtown store.

My, how my views have changed.  This may have been the single pleasantest part of my hike on Sunday.  This woods is on the northeast corner of Yale Ave and John St, running north along Yale and east along John, on each of which streets it has at least one entrance.

The store opened in 1996, so I doubt the woods is older.  I actually called there earlier this evening, asking whether it had a name, and none of the three people I spoke with knew of one; one said "It's our landscaping."  Uh huh.  It's a roughly one-acre park, and it ought to have a name, even though, but actually precisely because, naming something makes it harder to kill.

Cascade Playground

Dear Diary, I hope you aren't tired of this business of saving the biggest for last, but anyway this is the last iteration of it.

Cascade Playground has great edges:

surrounding a boring middle:

but maybe you can see, way in the background of that photo, the people setting up the food bank, which isn't boring at all.

I think that blue thing in the first photo above is the Little Free Library, in which I found mostly YA books, wanted several, but resisted taking any.  On a different level of reading, signs in and near Cascade Playground were what reminded me of REI's park and informed me of the Water Quality Project and the South Lake Union Community Center.  I think this park may really be, as its advocates certainly think, its neighbourhood's heart.

Most of what I want to say about Cascade Playground, though, has to wait for pages outside this series.  Later this week or maybe this coming weekend, I hope to show you, dear Diary, a greatly improved map of all these places I've been talking about.  And the artist credits will of course go into this series.  But otherwise, of course, I have to put plumbing forward again, which will take some time, and I have a number of other series planned, including one for this weekend.

My intention is to return to North Seattle with a water fountain hike in January.  One of the other series is also North Seattle-specific, but others are broader in scope.  So I hope, dear Diary, you aren't tired of excursions yet.

Anyway, until later, dear Diary.  Happy days and nights, and happy holidays, if it takes that long.  Good night.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VIIB: Northeast (central group)

Dear Diary,

This is the smallest group of parks to cover in northwestern downtown.  There are seven in the remaining group; as I just told you, there are at least seven, more likely eight, in the group already covered in a page I thought pretty thorough at six.  But this group, as far as I know, consists of only four parks.  On the other hand, one is Seattle's oldest park, and one of the biggest downtown, which means, in the order of increasing size this series follows, it comes last in this page.

South Lake Union Community Center

The smallest park in what amounts to northwestern northeast downtown is one that doesn't exist yet.  I read a couple of articles last night about the city's sale of the "Mercer Mega Block", bounded by Dexter and 9th Avenues, Roy and Mercer Streets, in 2019.  (Actually, Google now tells me, three articles:  one, two, three.)  But I'm not telling you about it to judge it, dear Diary, but to note that once the block, currently looking like this:

gets built, it's supposed, by contract, to include a 30,000 square foot community center, which is to be rent-free for the city for forty years.  The "rent-free" obviously means the city learnt its lesson from the Belltown Community Center fiasco (though it leaves a nasty surprise for some mayor decades hence); but the 30,000 means it's to be over ten times as large as the Belltown CC as was combined with the International District-Chinatown one.

One implication:  The city probably isn't going to build its own Belltown CC.

If the center gets built, I'm guessing it would probably be bigger than this next park.

(Amazon) Grand Plaza

Well, yes, that's a pretentious name, but if you were a corporate titan putting a park adjacent to your headquarters, would you settle for less?  This plaza faces west toward Terry Ave between Republican and Harrison Streets, and I don't know when it opened - 2017 or earlier.

But it's at least a pretty good plaza.  Amazon obviously found a park designer (or more than one) willing to work with the basic idea of a concrete plaza, and talented enough to make it physically interesting even apart from such hyper-kinetic efforts to "activate" it as pursued, for example, by the Downtown Seattle Association in Westlake Park.  And then gave that designer or designers carte blanche.  They did not fall for the common tech-bro trap of thinking they knew better than the experts, and they did not stint.

My first photo can't appear in this series, but my second was of triple trash:

And after the basics came, well, not quite awe, but admiration, anyhow:

A couple of detail notes:  One sign that Amazon gave the designer(s) freedom is all those stairs.  They did install a ramp, but it doesn't go everywhere the stairs do.

And as I've already mentioned, this park's interactive electronic doodad for the holidays didn't excite me.  It's a series of rings which are supposed to provide a sonic experience as one walks through them.  (Um, again with disability blockage.  Maybe all the stairs were originally Amazon's idea after all?)  Well, having seen it done, I did walk through them, but heard nothing, and, um, the walk by itself is nothing special.

Still, Amazon's Grand Plaza is a reasonable park for the go-getters of South Lake Union, and was, at the beginning of my hike yesterday, a very pleasant surprise for me.

(?Vulcan) Denny Playfield

There are worse ways to do private parks.

I haven't found any reference to how long Denny Playfield, which is about the western 2/3 of the block between 9th and Westlake Avenues, John St and Denny Way, has been what it is now:  a big, boring lawn leading up to a full basketball court with benches and a water fountain adjoining.  (The court hasn't been re-lined in way too long, though.)

 

Apparently Paul Allen, i.e. Vulcan, bought it by the mid-1990s.  In 2014 they proposed to build on top, but nothing happened, except that sometime between then and now, the already private park got made more private, accessible by rental only:

Now there are signs about a "Proposed Land Use Action", but between the graffiti and the haze induced by changing computer systems at the renamed city department involved, I can't tell whether the signs are years or months old:

The "South Lake Union Discovery Center" next to Denny Playfield has been closed ever since the pandemic began, while museums in general have been cautiously re-opening.

Turns out this is because it isn't a museum, it's really a rental hall decorated with Vulcan's plans for developing South Lake Union.  This Center, like the playfield next to it, is frozen in time, waiting for a wrecking ball that may never come, about as un-South Lake Union as anything can be.

Denny Park

This is the third-biggest city park downtown, after Freeway and Myrtle Edwards Parks; it occupies the whole area from Dexter to 9th Avenues and from John St to Denny Way.  (Yes, that means Denny Playfield is right next to Denny Park.)  It's also the oldest city park by general acclamation, having been turned over to the city in 1884.

So it's had a long, complicated history, well covered by Don Sherwood (nearly 1M PDF).

If I understand Sherwood correctly, its present incarnation goes back to the 1940s.  It's a striking one:  the park is now a Classical garden.  Order and symmetry are its watchwords.

 

On top of that, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation headquarters are here.

 

I imagine it must have hurt department staffers a lot to tolerate a homeless encampment in Denny Park last year, and now I understand why that was one of the first encampments swept when the city got tired of obeying the CDC.

The photos above come from November 26.  This is the park I came back to tonight, convinced I hadn't done enough to show how classical it really is.  Unfortunately, since my last night visit, a mediocre but effusive job of Christmas lighting has pervaded the walkways that are one of the hallmarks of the park's classical style, so only two of tonight's photos really show anything other than those lights.  It isn't really a classical garden, because it has reasonably big stands of trees:

And yet it is, because of those sweeping, oh so orderly, walkways:

The park has two notable, recentish features carefully fitted into place between the walkways:  a playground, and a supposedly "temporary" dog off-leash area, my photo of which didn't work at all.

Speaking of temporary, so, dear Diary, will sleep be for me tonight, but I'd better get started with it.  I'll try to tell you about the ridiculously numerous parks of Cascade tomorrow night.  Good night(s) and good day(s) until then.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part VIIA: Northeast (southern group)

Dear Diary,

Well, I'm more or less done.

Today I visited sixteen park-like places in northeastern Downtown Seattle, having set out knowing of twelve.  Turns out I missed at least one more.

Since this series is about park appreciation, not the restrooms and water fountains on which most of your pages have focused, dear Diary, and I found lots to appreciate in these places, I took lots of photos.  Various people speak of the northeastern part of downtown as three separate neighbourhoods - South Lake Union (which obviously exists), Cascade (which a significant number of residents insist exists), and the Denny Triangle (which I'm much less sure about).  This page concerns the parks and similar places near or along Westlake Ave, of which I found six; by some definitions but not all, these are at least some of the parks of the Denny Triangle.

Westlake Square

The smallest park in northeast downtown Seattle, opened in 1964, the triangle between Westlake and 6th Avenues and Stewart St, is a sad little place with no distinctions.  I've mocked the tendency to put sculptures and bus stops into these triangles as a way of keeping the homeless out, but some of the triangles in northeastern downtown omit these precautions, this is one, and boy, does it make a difference here.

Westlake Square basically consists of sidewalk, with a few planters, and a couple of table-and-chair arrangements of that flimsy-looking metal furniture I called kitschy at Freeway Park, as the only testimony that it's actually a park.  The first time I walked through it for this project, someone was sleeping in it, but downtown, that's common both on sidewalks and in parks, so it doesn't prove anything.

(Vulcan) Unnamed park

The triangle between 9th and Westlake Avenues and Denny Way is the northernmost of these parklets, and the other one that obviously forgot the bus stop plus art recipe.  It basically consists of benches:

which look comfortable, and a few of which are close enough together that if I were foolish enough, I might figure out a way to sleep on them.  On the whole, I was pretty happy with this unpretentious parklet actually offering rest to the weary on Denny, which is exactly what the point was:

I don't know when it opened.

McGraw Square

McGraw Square, which opened in 1911, forgot neither bus stop nor art; it's the southern terminus of the South Lake Union streetcar, and it has a boring statue of the former Seattle police chief and Washington governor it's named after:

Its main claim to fame, though, is that it's a kind of museum of park seating.  I found no fewer than five kinds of places to sit, and had to group them to photograph them.

The top photo shows wooden and concrete benches; the bottom one the kitschy furniture, weird cocoon-like seats under the bus shelter, and one of several blobbish stone seats.

For its centenary, in 2011 McGraw Square was passed from the management of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation (which still owns it) to that of the Seattle Department of Transportation.  It's the triangle between 5th Ave, the line of Westlake Ave, and Stewart St, kitty-corner from Westlake Square.

Urban Triangle Park

This is the newest park in this page, opened this year, and still without its mini-playground.  It's the triangle between Lenora St, Westlake Ave (more precisely, the streetcar tracks), and the line of an alley that exists on some blocks between 8th and 9th Avenues.

It's a strikingly parkish park for downtown, as witness that play equipment still to come.  It has actual grass, and actual picnic tables, as well as hybrid benches (stone seats, but wooden backs).

I think it's a fine addition to downtown's parks.

(Amazon) Unnamed park

On the block between 6th and 7th Avenues and Blanchard and Lenora Streets, Amazon has two buildings, one of which is famous, the Amazon Spheres.  Since they opened in 2018, I assume the park to their north did too.  OpenStreetMap calls the northeastern part "Day 1 Field" (Amazon Day 1 is the other building, north of the park), the southwestern "Rufus Dog Park".  I think the whole thing is obviously a single park, and so consider it, at least as far as I know, unnamed.  (I also wonder whether it's meant to be continuous with areas across 7th Ave, between Lenora and Blanchard and again between Blanchard and Bell, that are somewhat parkish, but not enough so to stand on their own.)

I'll speak in praise of Amazon's park-making in the next page, but this is actually a much more successful Amazon park, at least to judge by attendance on what's probably the last nice weekend day of the year.  I could take only the scantiest of photos, because there were so many, many people around.  The dog park had some visitors:

as did the 6th Ave entrance, where the benches are, and where I found triple trash:

But it was a lost cause from getgo to photograph the field, on which, at present, are installed a set of see-saws that produce music when they're used.  I could hear the results.  These see-saws were, this afternoon, wildly popular with children and adults alike; there were actual crowds there, dear Diary.

So I'm not sure how heavily used the park would be in their absence, but for all I actually know, maybe those see-saws have been there for years.  (A quick search, though, suggests that they're pretty new.)

The areas across 7th Ave didn't share in this park's bounty of people this afternoon, an argument against including them in this park.

Westlake Park

Speaking of popular...

Westlake Park is far enough south that I could have put it into my central downtown area.  This would've crystallised in your pages, dear Diary, an opposition Charles Mudede set up in his attack on Freeway Park.  He quoted the then-director of the Freeway Park Association as saying that his favourite park was actually Westlake Park.

And really, in many ways they are opposites.  Westlake is a concrete plaza, like the northern area Freeway disputes with the Convention Center, but Freeway proper has lots of grass and trees.  Freeway is complex; Westlake is simple.  In Freeway, short sight lines and plentiful hiding places have aided violent crimes; insecurity in Westlake is a matter of pickpockets and homeless people.  (Ahem.)

(On the other hand, they were built relatively close together in time, as well as space - Freeway in 1976, with additions in the 1980s; Westlake in 1988.  They both use lots of concrete.  They've both been popular.  This is an endless game.)

Anyway, Westlake Park is the triangle between 4th Ave, Pine St, and the line of Westlake Ave, which actually used to be Westlake Ave until sometime in the 1960s.  It's a concrete plaza, and as far back as I remember (2006) there've been attempts to enliven it, attract housed people, basically.  (Compare Ballard Commons.)   It's always, that I remember, had a bandstand on its wider north side.  And it's always, that I remember, had these weird seemingly structural blocks without actual structures, near its narrow south end:

But the Downtown Seattle Association takes Westlake Park pretty personally, and in 2015 (according to them) or 2016 (according to the parks department) took over the park's management.  They kicked events in the park into high gear; for example, today, when I visited, the park was so crowded partly because it was the last nice weekend day to be expected this year, but partly because there'd been a concert two hours earlier.  And although the crowd I saw included all races known to me, many of them looking quite happy (I imagined them telling each other "Told you it'd be exciting to come downtown today!"), I find the DSA's idea of programming, and the park they put it into, rather too ... white bread, for my own personal tastes.

Now, some things, people who prefer white bread do better than my sort.  Holiday lights, for example:

My camera doesn't do any kind of lights well, but the sight of them as I walked west on the north side of Pine just about took my breath away, so I can recommend that vantage point to any of your readers who are interested, dear Diary.

And anyway, lots of people do prefer white bread.  I want a parks department that has room for both Freeway and Westlake Parks, even if I personally prefer the former.

All for now, dear Diary.  Next:  the parks of South Lake Union proper.  Life isn't fair; several of the parks there and in Cascade strike me as really neat, but these last two parks are the only ones I found crowded today.  Anyway, please expect the pages with those neat parks further north tomorrow night; I can't afford to keep getting to work at 10 A.M.  So good night, and good times until then.

The Parks of Downtown Seattle, part VIA: North-Central (smaller places)

Dear Diary,

I'm back, and ready to write about the parks of Belltown and about Seattle Center.

In writing the catch-up pages, the last few, I've gotten out of the habit, but since this page and part VII shouldn't need any catch-up pages, I'm going back to writing from smallest to largest.  Since both pages include several private parks and similar things that I haven't found in Seattle's real property reports, this is taking some guesswork on my part.

(City of Seattle) Al Rochester's Podium

This is a small area with benches where 4th Ave meets Denny Way.  More precisely, it's the oddly shaped polygon made by Clay St, 4th Ave in the direction it goes north of Clay, the line 4th Ave follows up to Clay, and Denny.  It's pretty certainly the smallest more or less public, more or less park-like, area I found in north-central downtown Seattle.

Since I remember walking along Denny as consistently exhausting, I can only applaud anything that puts more benches along that street.  I'm also amused by my own reactions to the guy it's named after.

(The plaque, that is, was donated by family members, and for all I know the benches; the land was the city's to start with.)  Al Rochester seems to have been the kind of politician everybody liked, which in my experience means the kind who doesn't get much done, but he also seems to have spearheaded the World's Fair that created Seattle Center.  So what do I know, dear Diary?

(SDOT) Tilikum Place

Tilikum Place is a typical Seattle Department of Transportation downtown park:  a triangle with brick paving, a bus stop, some sculpture.  However, it also has benches, which makes a big difference; people other than commuters want to spend time there, sometimes.  Though maybe not on a rainy Sunday in December:

Oh, and it has trees, which probably provide shade in summer.  Tilikum Place is probably my favourite among the parks of Belltown, not that that's saying much, as we'll see.  It's another of the SDOT parks that has its own Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation web page, and a rather entertaining page it is, too, mainly about this sculpture:

The sculpture doesn't greatly impress me as art, but as an image of an American Indian leader rather than a settler one, I'll take what I can get.

This is one of several parks in this page which I visited on November 21 with a friend, not long after telling you, dear Diary, that I hoped not always to hike alone for you.  It was a very pleasant afternoon, though few photos resulted.

Tilikum Place is also on Denny, between Cedar St, the line Cedar St takes until it reaches that spot, and 5th Ave.

Belltown Community Center

Yes, "No Public Restrooms".  Yes, the particular private business now resident where the 2020 real property report incorrectly claims the city still had a lease had reason to put that sign up.  The Belltown Community Center was promised voters in a 1999 vote, but the resulting money wasn't actually enough to buy real estate in Belltown.  So the parks department gave up and leased a space, which opened in 2012.  The lease ran for seven years, turned out something of a boondoggle, and wasn't renewed after 2018.  So, more or less, says an exceptionally detailed and informative blog post by your old, um, frenemy, dear Diary, Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for the parks department.

I'd imagined it would've gotten a lot of visits from poor people who'd finished their business at the DSHS office nearby, but apparently it actually wasn't popular much at all.  Still, my friend, who is not poor and who lives in Belltown, was as disappointed to see that sign on November 21 as I'd been a week earlier, and it introduces both the series of parks on Bell St (the BCC was at 5th Ave & Bell), and this page's theme.

The private business is a "Dashmart", apparently one of those "dark grocery stores" we kept hearing about early in the pandemic, but this one owned not by a grocery chain (whose workers probably would be unionised) but by the delivery business Doordash (whose workers probably wouldn't be unionised).  Ironically, the people I saw today picking up or dropping off items looked, by and large, about as poor as I'd imagined the users of the Belltown Community Center to be.

(?Port of Seattle) Unnamed parklet

According to the King County Parcel Viewer, the Port owns the building this small space (which I found through Open Street Map) seems to be attached to, which it calls the Viewpoint Building, and in the past called World Trade Center North.  It's basically a paved space between the two buildings that share the block between Elliott Ave, Wall St, Bell St, and the railroad.  It could've been the Battery St Street End, but that's actually on the shoreline one block southwest and down.  It looks like this:

So basically, it has seating (I think) at the far end, a view in the same place, and a basketball hoop.  It's about as good as Belltown parks get, unfortunately.  It has a gate structure, but no actual gate within it.  However, the stack in the distance before the view, in the photo above, includes that gate and a whole bunch of similar panels, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find this little parklet fenced a year, maybe even a month, from now.

(Private) The Fourth & Blanchard Building's Courtyard

One building in Belltown has a huge front yard, complexly and interestingly landscaped.  It seems to have noticed this space becoming popular with people from outside the building; on all sides, what would seem to have started as entrances have been fairly permanently walled with materials that probably were more or less ready at hand.  Well, all that is the owners' and even the tenants' right.

But one element of that courtyard is a sculpture, and while the woman that sculpture depicts may not be intended as homeless, she's certainly intended as tired:

And it is just rude to taunt that sculpted woman, who has no choice but to rest indefinitely, with a "No Loitering" sign:

Regrade Park

This is the second of the three Bell St parks, occupying a little more than a quarter-acre at the southwest (actually south) corner of 3rd Ave & Bell.  It is the third-biggest parks department park in Belltown.  And...

in 2005 the entire park was turned into the fourth-smallest off-leash area for dogs in Seattle.  All that from this 2017 report, a 194-page PDF, which informed me that there's an organised group in Seattle who take care of most of the existing off-leash areas and push for the creation of more.  Their "biennial report" is the most interesting part of the document, pages 94-114 (going by the numbers on the bottoms of the pages).

As you can see, dear Diary, it's a much more attractive off-leash area than the one I've shown you in Magnuson Park.  It has actual colour.  It has trees.

But I'm pretty sure Regrade Park is a place where dogs, perhaps, can recharge their souls, but people are likely to find that rather more difficult.

Belltown Cottage Park

Quite a few people probably can recharge their souls more or less easily at this next park, the largest real park in Belltown, which is on the southeast (actually east) corner of Elliott Ave and Vine St.  Probably two or three dozen people, total.  For everyone else, soul-recharging takes some rule-following, some consideration, and some luck, at the very least.

This park is split down the middle.  The parks department owns the whole thing, but accounts for it as two properties in the real property report:  "Belltown Cottages" and "Belltown Ppatch", respectively 7,216 and 7,214 square feet.

This was the only place my friend and I reached early enough to photograph on November 21.  In the P-patch half, it's easy to take pictures.  And yes, it's a real P-patch:

It was opened in 1995, and obviously a lot of loving work went into it; notice the beauty given to the stairs up to it:

The Cottage half is rather harder for me to photograph, because unlike Hubbard Homestead, the cottages of Belltown Cottage Park aren't lost to history.  They're actual homes in which actual people live.  There are three, though usually only two at a time are occupied, and they have one small back yard that the general public is supposed to believe (but not really believe) is actually a public park.

I don't know how long they've been specifically the homes of writers in residence at Richard Hugo House, which is on 11th Ave on Capitol Hill, maybe a mile away uphill, but the program goes back to 1999.

I only stopped briefly there today, struck by something I hadn't noticed on previous visits.  Like most P-patches, this one has a fence and a gate:

 

(City of Seattle) Unnamed possible park

I was ready, today, to declare that Bell St isn't really where the parks of Belltown are, that unofficial private parks on Battery St were the neighbourhood's real gathering places.  But no, the only person I saw at the Port of Seattle parklet was one guy shooting hoops (who kindly backed away long enough for me to photograph the area).  And Seattle doesn't want anyone at all at this next property, which could be Belltown's biggest park.

Yep, another hill.  This one wraps around a parking garage at the corner, which is city-owned; the Parcel Viewer sees the garage as a taxable property, but not this area, but I'd bet it's city-owned too.  As if the fence weren't enough, the city has signs here too:

In case any of your reader don't recognise this kind of sign, dear Diary, it's headlined "No camping in emphasis area".  In other words, while being homeless anywhere in Seattle is essentially illegal, involves trespassing either on private or on public property, "emphasis areas" are places where the city really doesn't want anyone camping.

I can't believe it takes a non-parks department staffer to state the obvious here, but has it occurred to the city that it could build a Belltown Community Center at the top of the hill and a Belltown Playground at the bottom, and deter campers that way?  Instead of just setting up the same tired refrain, "We can't have anything nice because then homeless people would wreck it."  Which is the message communicated by that fence and that sign.

How much of Freeway Park have we wrecked?  How much damage did my sleeping in Kirke Park, Soundview Playfield, Sandel Playground, and Green Lake Park, among others, when hiking for you, dear Diary, do to the enjoyment of housed Seattleites?  I'm particularly irked by the repetition of this meme in Belltown because it isn't the homeless who've taken the parks away from Belltown.

It isn't big companies, either.  One of your themes, dear Diary, all along, has been the public and the private.  The bet on which I started you was that mayor Jenny Durkan was right to say that we homeless should, during the lockdowns, rely on public park restrooms rather than, in my case, the more convenient ones at the private University Village shopping mall.  I wrote a whole page about the difficulty in doing so when private restrooms were reliable and public ones weren't, in your earliest days, and a few weeks later wrote what I then thought was the beginning of your conclusion on the same topic.  It's easy to think that "the private" always has to be business.

But in Belltown, "the private" is neither business, nor inconsiderate homeless campers.  It's gardeners, and it's a writing program, and it's dog keepers.  And it's the scaredy-cats at the City, and perhaps soon at the Port, who put fences around what Belltown needs.

There are two main complaints about homeless campers in parks and for that matter everywhere.  One is that we're scary to many people.  I don't see what homeless people are supposed to do about that.  It's not as though I suddenly turned from a mild-mannered office clerk into an axe murderer when I became homeless, nor is it especially surprising that I'm now again a mild-mannered office clerk.  Actually, I was a mild-mannered office clerk while homeless, working as a tax preparer, submitting suggested changes to library classifications.  It's not my fault that I nevertheless scared people.

But the other complaint about homeless people is more serious.  We take away public geography and turn it private.  There essentially isn't any other way to exist while homeless, that doesn't involve that.

What lesson, then, do the parks of Belltown, where any number of housed people have made public geography private, teach the conscientious homeless man?

In the remaining two places in Seattle's north-central downtown that I intend to tell you about, dear Diary, the issue of public and private comes up again, as it will in northeastern downtown, where there are new and serious private parks.  But I'm used to thinking that Blogspot doesn't want quite so many photos in one page - it certainly didn't when I wrote your pages on my phone - and anyway, the parks I just discussed pose this theme of the public and the private more sharply than the ones remaining in north-central downtown do.  So yet again, I'm splitting this page, and that'll probably happen with part VII too, because there are lots of parks in northeastern downtown Seattle.

Until the next page, then, dear Diary, happy minutes.