Bitter Lake Reservoir Park Yesterday and Froula Park Today

Dear Diary,

Yesterday and today I hiked mostly for another set of pages I hope to write in you this month, but yesterday I also took the opportunity to visit a couple of isolated parks with plumbing, and both days I visited parks that are on reservoir grounds but, mysteriously, don't have plumbing of their own.

I told you, dear Diary, that I didn't expect the remainder of the hikes to paint as rosy a baseline picture as the first hike, through most of the NW parks, had.  I just hadn't expected things to go downhill quite so fast.  In the two parks I visited yesterday, I found two closed restrooms and one missing water fountain.  However, one water fountain I hadn't found working in the past is now working.  Still, it's a problem that isolated parks in northernmost Seattle offer even fewer restrooms than the tiny numbers the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has put there in the past.

Bitter Lake Playfield

Unlike Ballard Playground and Loyal Heights Playfield, whose restrooms are built into the Community Centers those parks contain, at Bitter Lake Playfield, there's a separate restroom building.  I've been told in the past that these restrooms were open 24 hours, presumably because they're so far from other parks with restrooms, and thus inconvenient to service.  (What I've seen with my own eyes is that they stayed open quite late, but I've yet to incorporate this park into any of my "all night long" hikes to really verify.)  However, in the past, they weren't open all year.

Last year, I visited those restrooms in early March, and they weren't open yet.  I complained because there was supposed to be a project to replace those restrooms (though not in such a way that the new ones could stay open all year), and it hadn't happened yet.

So of course this year I visited just about ready to explode, and I'm complaining because the project isn't done yet, and I had to use the "sanican"s instead.

To be fair, because the water fountain was running, I was able to use the soap from the hand-washing machine and the water from the water fountain to wash my hands, in much the same way as I'd described in "Hygiene Is a Luxury I Can't Afford", also about this park, nearly four years ago, but with far fewer mishaps this time.  Yes, in the ideal world the hand-washing machine would also provide water, but one can't have everything.

In any event, the parks department currently says "SPR anticipates the restroom and remainder of electrical work for the tennis court lights to be completed by mid-July", but, well, that didn't happen:

So I wondered if the department were simply running out the clock until the restrooms would have to close anyway.  Again in the ideal world, since we were told that the parks department was making a financial plan to enable all its restrooms to be open year-round, the delay could be while the contractor tries to figure out a way to fit heat into whatever space is available.  But in this real world, I doubt that's actually what's going on.

In any event, there's a water fountain missing.  It used to be roughly here:

adjacent to the then-playground area.  Maybe I missed it - the new playground area was in use the whole time, and I didn't want to intrude.  There are several photographs of it at the Google Drive folder, which also includes all the above photos; it has a round bowl, unlike the square-bowled double fountain that's definitely still there and that helped me wash my hands.

Carkeek Park

I was much less desperate when I visited Carkeek Park, which is fortunate because it's much further from the street grid than Bitter Lake Playfield is.  I found all its water fountains running.  Even the archaic stone-clad one at the Environmental Learning Center, which I've never found running before, now gives super-abundant water:

I didn't try to use that arching stream, but did fill my bottle from both of the others.  The one in the playground area gave fairly brownish-tinted water, which I threw away and replaced with water from the fountain in the Eddie McAbee entrance area, which was still mildly tinted but proved drinkable.

So that's the good news.  The bad news is that when Carkeek Park was planned, it was planned for two restroom pairs, but for one of those two to have doors that opened indoors.  As happens to all park buildings given enough time, the buildings those restrooms were in have closed to the public, and so Carkeek Park is left with only one restroom pair.  Last winter I celebrated because a building had re-opened to the public, but it turns out to have been a temporary expedient while a building in a different park was being renovated.

 "No Public Restroom".  They know what they're doing is wrong, and this is their response?

Dear Diary, does any of your readers think I'm blowing smoke?  The freaking map provided to visitors to Carkeek Park specifically displays a symbol it clearly identifies with restrooms, and displays it in connection with these buildings.

The good news, I suppose, is that they aren't adding insult to injury any more.  In the past there was a "sanican" in that area, but it was locked, because it was being used to store science projects for the school using the buildings.  It's no longer there.  It's pleasant to think that someone got a severe talking-to about the proper use of equipment the City of Seattle pays rent for.

Bitter Lake Reservoir Park

This is a weird park.  It's fundamentally a creation of Seattle Public Utilities, and I've actually spent a fair amount of time trying and failing to find the actual boundary between public and non-public areas there.  So I don't have a clue how big it is, and that's weird.  (For example, I know that Carkeek Park is very much the biggest one-restroom park in north Seattle.)  Also, it has fitness equipment I've never seen used, and a playground I haven't seen much used - quite unlike old or new at Bitter Lake Playfield.

They're aware that that playground isn't popular, and they're planning to renovate it, with a major stage to be reached in, of course, mid-July past, oops.

And yet the park as a whole is so popular that probably the single park photo I've most wanted to show you, dear Diary, but have been unable to, is the photo of its grand entrance from above, because every time I've been there, someone has always been in the frame.  At the moment that viewpoint is even grander, because the rowan trees framing it are in fruit, and while rowan berries are poisonous, they sure are pretty.  Alas, my phone has trouble photographing red, so their beauty is wasted in this substitute photo.

Froula Park

It has come to my attention that I've been misnaming this park.  I like to give parks the best name I can give them.  Most notably, the park the parks department calls "Ross Playground" is "Ross Playfield" on its scoreboard, and "Ross Park" on its park sign.  So I call it Ross Park.  Well, um, on the park sign of the park the parks department calls "Froula Playground", this is what we find:

My apologies.

I've also neglected this park more than I should have.  This time I saw a sign that I didn't remember, and certainly didn't tell you about, dear Diary.

Apparently Roosevelt Reservoir has hidden depths, if you'll pardon the pun, dear Diary.  Why did they feel the need to post that sign, and when did they do so?  Was that restroom ever open?  To whom?

It's hard to imagine Froula anything having mysteries, but it clearly does.

It also has swings.  I found years ago, long before your birth, dear Diary, that I actually still enjoy swinging.  But I got few opportunities to do it at University Playground, then near where I slept, because I was rarely OK with leaving my stuff unattended in order to use the swings, given the kinds of people I usually saw at that park.  Froula Park's swings are all too high off the ground for me to climb into easily, so they aren't really a solution, but I'll keep looking.

All for now, dear Diary.  I hope tomorrow to start writing in you the other series I've been hiking for, but we'll see.  Happy days and nights until we meet again.

On the Last Day of Summer

Dear Diary,

I didn't fulfill my goal of hiking this summer, as I'd hoped.  I'm just too lazy in hot weather to get it done.  But it wasn't hot today, and I thought I could at least visit four places that have things I understood as summer-specific, things that would be gone tomorrow.  Two of those places have restrooms I've never even seen.  So I went out, though mostly by bus rather than on foot, to:

• Magnuson Park's Armory, the east side, where there are restroom doors I'd never found open, but which supposedly open in summer;
• Matthews Beach's restroom building, the east side, where there are doors to restrooms, supposedly equipped with showers, which I'd never found open because they're supposedly opened only in summer for beachgoers;
• Soundview Playfield's water fountain, which is adjacent to a water play area, so I'd always assumed it didn't work because it was on the same pipes as that area; 
• and Green Lake Park's Bathhouse Theatre building, whose restrooms' doors to the outside open summer and winter, but not spring and fall.  Even before I lived near it, though, I was familiar with this one.

(The links are to folders at my Google Drive account where photos, including ones not shown below, can be found.)

Now, my premise could be faulted.  The last day of summer by astronomical standards is the day before the equinox, September 21st this year.  It's right on the front page of the Seattle Public Schools' website that classes don't start until September 6th for most students, which means tomorrow is the last day of summer for them.  Cliff Mass told us a week ago that meteorological autumn was kicking in early this year.  My personal definition of summer for Seattle (as opposed to other, Midwestern, places I've lived) is that it ends at the end of September.  (See, I don't think Seattle has a winter unless it snows.  So I figure four months for each of the other seasons.)

But Labor Day is still a traditional meaning in the US for "last day of summer", and that meant for me that it was a reasonable guess as to what the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation would use as a cutoff.  Hence my trip today.

So what happened?

Magnuson Park

Nothing new here.

Maybe nobody remembered to open them on Labor Day because the parks department was short-staffed.  Maybe someone at the parks department was watching the weather and said "No point in opening these, the temperature won't exceed 70."  (And how does that affect the crying need for restrooms in that part of Magnuson Park?)  But maybe the parks department has simply forgotten that once upon a time, these doors actually opened once in a while, and were advertised as being open in summer.  All I know is that they were closed, and since they don't have handles, that means they were locked.

Matthews Beach

Matthews Beach has two sets of restrooms.  One set is a pair of ungendered single-user stalls.  The other is a pair of gendered rooms that include not just toilets and sinks, but also, so I'm told, showers.  (As opposed to the outdoor showers offered at Magnuson and Golden Gardens Parks.  I don't remember any at Carkeek Park, but that doesn't prove they aren't there too.)

Because I don't hike in summer, I've never found those rooms open.  Well, not today either.  I took four photos, dear Diary, and will show you just one, saving the rest for the Google Drive folders.

 

See, these doors do have handles.  So how could I prove that the doors were locked without taking an action photo and risking my new phone?  Well, notice not far to the right of the handle in that photo - yes, there's a lock on the door.  That's how.

So.  Matthews Beach was closed to swimming for the rest of the summer in mid-July, because the parks department no longer has the staffing flexibility to keep trying to re-open it.  I suppose it makes sense therefore to close the shower restrooms.  After all, despite the park's distance from places where homeless people hang out, there's always the risk that some homeless person could use the showers to get clean, and we all know that it's evil to let homeless people become more like other people.  More realistically, there's the risk of vandalism, especially without a staffer (lifeguard) on site.

But at this rate, am I ever going to see these restrooms?  Am I ever going to catch just the right eyeblink of summer to go looking?

So I was worried that Soundview Playfield's kind of boxlike restrooms might be hard to reach because of construction (I thought I'd heard something about the play field itself, adjacent, getting a makeover; maybe I had, but there was no construction and no signage when I got there), and I was worried that the buses would take too long (but actually I had excellent luck with buses today)...  So I used one of the single-user stalls at Matthews Beach.  Most of what I used worked just fine.  However, the sink seemed to reach equilibrium with water still at its bottom, and the photo of that I tried to take will illustrate the other problem with that stall:

(Yes, dear Diary, the light didn't come on.)

Things improved from here, however.

Soundview Playfield

For three years now, I've assumed Soundview Playfield's water fountain didn't work because it was on the same plumbing as the adjacent water feature, so when the latter was turned off (most of the time), so was the water fountain.

To prepare for today's trip, I even checked this helpful schedule, but in an epically stupid move, convinced myself to ignore what the page said in black and while about how Soundview's wading pool 

would close on August 20th, I just knew it really had a spray park, and those didn't close until today.  Honestly, after my complaints about tech malfunctions earlier this evening - well, I should be grateful that tech doesn't malfunction as consistently as my brain does.  But anyway, I found out before leaving that I'd misunderstood, but still determined to go.

And I'm glad I did, because it turns out Soundview Playfield's water fountain can actually run while the pool isn't in operation; I'd been wrong about that all along.

Green Lake Park

Nothing new here, either.  The Bathhouse Theatre building restrooms were open, as they should have been (unlike the two sets above).

So that was my summer adventure.  I'll try to take it earlier next summer, or maybe only when there are no algae to worry about, or something.

I hope to check the rest of the park restrooms before winter, but I'm not making any promises.  That said, October isn't far away, and my public libraries spreadsheet did survive the crash, so it'll soon be time for, and I can deliver, another round of library hours pages.  One way or another, anyway, happy days and nights, dear Diary, until we meet again.

No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe

Dear Diary,

Here at last is my review of this book, which was published by Coach House Books in Toronto, copyright 2018.

It's been hard for me to evaluate, I think, for two main reasons.  One has to do with Lowe's goals in writing it; the other, with how she wrote it.

I think she had two main political goals in the book:  She wanted to make the case, for the countries she focused on (Canada, the UK, and the US), for more public restrooms, rather than the actual trend, which is fewer; and she wanted to make the case for nicer public restrooms, rather than the actual case, which, in those countries, is that people try to avoid them because they aren't nice.  This is a heavy lift.  What I've found in writing you, dear Diary, is that while I'm willing to complain about the most egregiously nasty aspects of particular public restrooms, I'm reluctant to do it all that often, because their mere availability is so much more important.

(She also wanted to tell interesting stories, of course, because that's how one sells a book on this sort of topic.  And she does tell interesting stories, but that's a rhetorical goal, not a political one.)

A particular element of the goal I'd rather she hadn't focused on is that it encourages her to pay relatively little attention to the important of public restrooms for homeless people.  She actually calls this out herself, noting that public restrooms are much more popular when people understand that the homeless aren't actually the only people who use them.  Since (this is me, not her) the homeless are essentially the untouchables of American society, as long as public restrooms are identified with the homeless, calling for restrooms to be nicer is going against public morality, which is that homeless people never deserve nice things.

So much, then, for purposes.  As for methods...

Lowe is a much more successful journalist than I am, and this is partly, I think, because she's mastered pyramid style:  Important stuff first.  This turns out not to be a good strategy for a book, at least not in the eyes of someone like me who tries to finish books.

She starts out incredibly strongly, with page after page introducing her main points and studded with quotable lines, of which I'll restrain myself to one, from page 2:  "the modern [Halifax] Common's twelve hectares hold tennis courts, ball diamonds, a skate park, a swimming pool, and a splash pad.  The place is built for leisure.  Unless, that is, you're the kind of person who uses the bathroom."

Her central point is that public restrooms aren't just open to everyone, they're needed by essentially everyone in modern cities.  Anyone moving around with infants, toddlers or small children needs them.  Anyone moving around with other charges, perhaps wheelchair-bound or infirm or demented, needs them.  Anyone moving around with any of a range of more or less common medical conditions needs them.  And anyone else often needs them anyway, unless they want to spend all their time at home, or have access to private restrooms at work.  (Which brings in people whose jobs involve moving around.)  Tourists need them, not that any of the 100% of American municipalities trying to increase tourism has noticed this. [1]  Oh, and by the way, women need them more - more often, and for menstruating women, at least, for more purposes - than men do.  Not that 51% of the population is a majority or anything...

She drives home the connection between mobility and restrooms with force in a recounting, as late as chapter 6, of the story of Camden Town, London's third women's restroom.  Discussing the work of architectural historian Barbara Penner, she writes:  "When people argue over public bathrooms, Penner says, they're usually fighting about the right of certain social groups to occupy public space....  To allow for the necessity of women's public toilets was to allow that women had the right to move freely through the city."  (Page 99.)

But she isn't satisfied with some number higher than 51%.  She wants to get as close to 100% as she can.  And pyramid style urges her to put what's most important first, so in the book's second half she focuses on ever-smaller groups:  the homeless (chapter 7; this is where Seattle's last attempt to provide public restrooms downtown comes in, pp. 131-132), people with various specific physical disabilities (chapter 8), the transgendered (chapter 9; she ultimately doesn't come to a conclusion).  And winds up with artists' conceptions of public restrooms (chapter 10).

So this is a book that's actually better when dropped somewhere around halfway through, even though Lowe's stock of trenchant observations, engaging interviews and stories, never falters.  It's not by any means a bad book if one finishes it, and those more idealistic than I might appreciate chapters 7 to 9 in the 1990s-style No Body Left Behind spirit in which they were written.  But read roughly the first half, stopping at chapter 6 or just maybe 7, and it's an excellent book.

[1] On my more recent series of hikes of downtown Seattle's parks, I was staring at the credit plaque for one of the sculptures in Pioneer Square, the park that is, when a woman asked what I was doing, and I told her about you, dear Diary.  So she asked me where I would advise someone to go to find a public restroom from that location.  Because, see, she's a tour guide, and she couldn't think of anywhere.

The answer, near as I can tell, is all the way uphill to Seattle City Hall.  And not outside business hours.  After dark?  Hmmm.  I don't think Pike Place Market's restrooms stay open all that late, and one can never predict Seattle Central Library's hours any more - OK, just checked, still closing at 6 P.M. every day.  So hmmm.  I'm not sure when the restrooms at Pier 62 close at night.  Failing those, probably Seattle Center or Cascade Playground, not even two miles away but with traffic lights most of the way.  Still, probably no more than an hour or two out of her tour group's time, if she has any evening or, um, weekend tour groups.  Every time one of the group needs a restroom.

Seattle does have one advantage over Poughkeepsie in the competition to attract more tourists while offering fewer public restrooms.  It's happy to lie about its restrooms, as we'll see as I get back to the downtown pages still to come.

Buildings of the UW's Seattle Campus, part IID: West, summary and prospects

Dear Diary,

It isn't easy to count the University of Washington's buildings, because one has first to define what one means by a building.  For present purposes, let's pretend that I visited 61 buildings in UW's West Campus and north and south of there, in the area from I-5 to 15th Ave NE and from the water to NE 45th St that I'm calling Brooklyn (well, OK, four are actually north of 45th).  This is more than I expect to list in East or South campuses, and is well over half the number in Central Campus.

Unlike Central Campus, but like the other two, very few of these buildings, most of which are publicly owned, are open to the public.  And fewer still offer public restrooms.  I don't need a whole alphabet for them.  And I don't really need another map for them, although this part includes both building and park maps anyway for completeness's sake.

The present

Here are the buildings that offer publicly reachable restrooms in this area, with the best information available to me about their hours:

• Hours not posted:
  1. University of Washington Medical Center Roosevelt Building 2 - 7 A.M. to 6 P.M. weekdays [1]
  2. University of Washington Police Building - 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. weekdays
• Posted against the public:
  3. Social Work Building (southern half) - 7:30 A.M. to 6 P.M. weekdays
  4. Condon Hall - 7 A.M. to 6 P.M. weekdays, if one can find an unlocked door
     
  5. Fishery Sciences Building - 7 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. weekdays
  6. Fisheries Research and Teaching Building - 7 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. weekdays
  7. Marine Studies Building - 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. weekdays
  8. John M. Wallace Hall - 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. weekdays
• Public restrooms with clear hours:
  9. University Book Store - 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Mondays through Saturdays, noon to 4 P.M. Sundays
  10. Schmitz Hall - 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. weekdays
  11. Drama Scene Shop - 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. weekdays
  12. Gould Hall - 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. weekdays
      

[1] - I clicked through 24 Web pages of clinics at UWMC - Roosevelt. The Exercise Training Center is open until 6 P.M., and the Spine Center and the Dermatologic Surgery Center open at 7 A.M.  The last-named is in Building 1, which doesn't have public restrooms, but the other two are in Building 2, which does.

Did you notice something, dear Diary?  Weekend hours are only at the Book Store.  And there are no evening hours, nothing after 6 P.M.

I wasn't familiar with most of these buildings before the lockdown, and not all of their previous hours are documented online (for example, the UW's pages for classroom buildings, such as Condon Hall, have never included hours).  But let's see how many are documented.  I already referred to the Book Store's mildly longer hours, three parts back.  The Exercise Training Center in UWMC-Roosevelt building 2 is recorded to have been open until 7:30 P.M. Mondays through Thursdays as recently as December 2019.  The UW Police Building's hours aren't much changed from January 2020.  The Built Environments Library in Gould Hall used to be open until 8 P.M. Mondays through Thursdays, and 1 to 5 P.M. weekends, as I noted in the academic libraries page.  A 1999 UW Daily article ("updated" in 2015) gives the same hours for Schmitz Hall as it's keeping now.

Let's also look at the nature of the obstacles.  At the Social Work Building and John M. Wallace Hall, signs on durable materials announce the public's unwelcome, although in each case signs on paper suggest otherwise.  At the other buildings, the barring signs are themselves on paper.  None of these buildings have the kind of painted-on-glass "Public Keep Out" notices common at the West Campus dorms.

So my best guess is that West Campus and its northern environs have never really been a good place for a homeless person to try to spend a rainy day, but have probably gotten somewhat worse since the pandemic.

I also don't know how long UW has been lecturing the residents of West Campus that they should fear their non-UW neighbours.   All those painted-on "Keep Out" notices suggest this pattern is longstanding.  At least one person other than me who disagrees with the message has been on West Campus recently, though:

The future

The day I photographed those posters (but didn't see, haven't seen, at all the one that seems to have fallen from the top), I also (well, that evening) photographed another poster, on 15th Ave somewhere south of Campus Parkway:

"Be a World of Good".  Comparable ambition to the previous slogan, "Be Boundless"; but decidedly more interested in generosity.

I was born to a geneticist and raised by her and my father, who, I've already told you, dear Diary, was an epidemiologist.  I grew up two blocks from a university library, and used to stay there past my bedtime.  The years I was homeless here are hardly the only years I've spent largely in university libraries.  I'm not trying to grind an anti-intellectual axe here.  It's just that I consider myself capable, given the atmosphere in which I grew up and have lived, of distinguishing a university's good deeds from its less good (let alone its evil) ones.

While looking for a name for what I eventually called the Fishery Sciences Courtyard, I came across a reference to it in the previously mentioned environmental impact statement for the UW's current Seattle Campus Master Plan (327-page PDF).  This eventually led me to a whole page of planning documents.  And one thing that's really up front in those documents is that the UW expects to build a lot in the next decade or so, and fully half of that building is planned for the West Campus.

Part of what that's about is that the UW is planning, although not in a rush, to get rid of most of its surface parking lots.  (The current occupation of lot W35 by the Haring Center's school can be seen as a trial run for this.)  Much of the Seattle campus is given to such lots, so that gives it lots of room to build.  I expect many of the buildings will include underground parking, but also, it turns out UW is subject to a cap on certain categories of parking.  See, the Master Plan is actually an agreement between the university and the City of Seattle, and one component of that agreement for some time now has been this cap.  And this time, the cap is being lowered, from 12,000 to 9,000 spaces.

So that's some of it, but there are much bigger surface parking lots in Central and East campuses than anywhere in West Campus.  The main thing is that the university has asked for, and been given, much higher height limits on much of West Campus than it had hitherto obeyed.  I mentioned that many of the buildings of West Campus weren't originally built for or by the university; they're also rather short, as are many of the buildings further north, outside the Master Plan's boundary.  So the UW can solve two problems at one stroke by tearing those inherited buildings down; it can get purpose-built university buildings, and it can get them taller.

Of the buildings I've discussed, Schmitz Hall, the Transportation Services Building, Condon Hall, Henderson Hall, the Child Center West Campus, the Southwest Maintenance Building, the Brooklyn Trail Building, the Ethnic Cultural Center Theatre, the Community Design Center, the Drama Scene Shop, the unnamed buildings at 3935 and 3939 University Way, the Purchasing and Accounting Building, the UW Lock Shop, the Northlake Building, Stevens Court, John M. Wallace Hall, the Fishery Teaching and Research Building, the Marine Studies Building, the Portage Bay Garage, the Child Center Portage Bay, the Ocean Research Building, and the Washington Sea Grant Program buildings are all candidates for demolition.  24 of the 61.

Also, the following parks I've described to you, dear Diary, will be affected by this plan.  H (805 NE Northlake Place), O07 (another landscaped area near the University Bridge head), R (Transportation Services Building Courtyard), T (Condon Hall Courtyard), and V (Child Center West Campus playgrounds) are all candidates to be built over.  N (Burke-Gilman Trail under the University Bridge), Q (Gould Park), Y (Fishery Science Building Courtyard), and Z (Burke-Gilman Trail near Brooklyn Ave) are all to be expanded, but are likely to change significantly in the process.  This is why I don't know, in particular, whether Tikvah's Garden will survive, to whatever extent it survives now.  It's to become part of what the Master Plan sees as the first really good West Campus park, the West Campus Green.  (Sakuma Viewpoint is perennially tugged between West and South campuses, so doesn't count.  Of course, the block the West Campus Green is to be on, the Fishery Science block, is also perennially tugged between those, but maybe a little less so.)

The UW also agreed to a cap on construction.  That's what the 50% refers to.  It gets to do net 6,000,000 new gross square feet of construction, and has agreed that 3,000,000 of those should be in West Campus.  The Master Plan itself insists that much of what a university does not only is inscrutable, but shouldn't be scrutinised at all.  So it doesn't say much about in what order this very tall order should be executed.  However, a different document, the 2018 West Campus Guidelines (95-page PDF), provides some hints.  On its page 73 is a map, distinguishing two ten-year tiers for the work (five buildings in the first tier), and also giving what sure looks like an exact order for the buildings to be built.  The Master Plan is of course correct that the university isn't committed to any particular order, but I suspect that left to its own devices, page 73 shows what it thinks might work best.

The building marked 1 on that map is the one to go in the southern half of the block between 40th St, University Way, the Burke-Gilman Trail, and Brooklyn Ave.  At this time that half-block is occupied by the Purchasing and Accounting Building (all of whose departments are still working from home), parking lot W12, and the UW Lock Shop, which is preparing to move:

I think it's a reasonably good bet that that building, labelled W27 (but a building, not a parking lot) on the map, really will be first.

And that triggers something else.  On page 240 of the Master Plan, we find what looks very like contract language:

Over the life of this CMP, the approximately
4-acre area designated as the “West Campus
Green” shall be reserved for open space,
except that minor structures supporting
the open space function are allowed.
Structures and improvements required for
utility infrastructure are also allowed. A
design and implementation plan for West
Campus Green and West Campus section
of the continuous waterfront trail shall be
completed by the earlier of: the time 1.5
million square feet of net new development
in West Campus sector is completed; or the
time the University submits its first permit
application for development of Site W27, W29,
W33, W34, or W35. A concept plan for all
three sections of the continuous waterfront
trail—West, South, and East—shall also be
completed by that time. The concept plan
for the continuous waterfront trail shall be
reviewed by SDCI for compliance with the
City’s Shoreline Management Master Program
and the University’s Shoreline Public Access
Plan. The continuous waterfront trail design
and implementation plan for the South and
East campus sectors shall include convenient
pickup and drop off facilities and signage
throughout the length of the trail that reflects
local Native American history. Construction
of the West Campus Green and the West
Campus section of the continuous waterfront
trail shall occur by the earlier of: completion
of 3.0 million gross square feet of net new
development in the West Campus sector; at
the completion of adjacent development sites
W29, W33, and W34; or the exhaustion of the
6 million gross square feet growth allowance.
In addition, as the University completes
development of Site W29, it shall complete
the “Plaza,” and as the University completes
development of Site W27, it shall complete the
“Belvedere,” both identified on page 98.

So basically, if the UW does start its West Campus remodelling at W27, it will deliberately be triggering various deadlines related to public open space.  (However, the first building in the numbered sequence to trigger the West Campus Green actually being built, which entails demolishing three not so very old, purpose-built buildings, is #5, W33.  So they aren't planning to force themselves to make that happen very soon.  Buildings 2-4 are between 40th St, University, the BGT, and 11th Ave.)

The Master Plan also promises that a whole lot of the new buildings will have "active edges".  Turns out an active edge can be almost anything - a classroom, for example.  But not an office.  So this isn't an outright promise that the university will have ground floor retail open to the public, say, let alone public restrooms, in the new buildings; but that's certainly the impression the more marketing-ish of the pages of the Master Plan try to convey.

Which brings me back to "Be a World of Good".  Which is the better deed?  To offer a bunch of parks, of which the West Campus Green is strongly hinted to get the park restrooms Fritz Hedges Waterway Park across the street didn't get [1], and then lock all the other doors?  Or to live up to the claims for "innovation" and "diversity" the Master Plan is full of, and reverse the recent trend of enforcing separation between town and gown with card readers?  I don't think the university, given the direction it's currently going, is even trying to live up to the spirit the Master Plan calls for, and sooner or later it's going to have to decide whether indulging fear is really the best it can do.

[1] Now we have a better reason than sloth or penury for the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's refusal to build restrooms at Fritz Hedges.  Future restrooms that someone else will pay for are always better than present ones that people can actually use.

The past

I plan, dear Diary, to publicise this part a little bit.  So I thought it would be helpful if I concluded it with references to the previous parts, both on the buildings of and near West Campus, and on the parks of Brooklyn.

"Buildings of the UW's Seattle Campus":

• Part I, Preface
• Part IIA, North of West Campus (actually, north of 41st St)
  
• Part IIB, Northern West Campus (41st St to the Burke-Gilman Trail)
  
• Part IIC, Southern West Campus (south of the Burke-Gilman Trail)
  

The final map:

 

"Six Hikes in Brooklyn":

• Part I, Northwest (parks A-C)
  
• Part II, West (parks D-G)
  
• Part III, Southwest (parks H-M)
  
• Part IV, Centre (parks N-P)
  
• Part V, East (parks Q-V)
  
• Part VI, Southeast (parks W-Z)
  

The final map:

Also relevant:  "Academic Library Hours One Year Later, part I:  Public universities".

Dear Diary, in the next week I really should finish with the academic libraries, as well as start a really long Korean drama and look for work.  So you probably won't hear much from me until I finish at least one part of the academic libraries remaining.  Happy days and nights until then.

 

Buildings of the UW's Seattle Campus, part I: Preface

Dear Diary,

The University of Washington's Seattle campus includes over 200 buildings; the exact number depends on exactly what one considers a building.

Some minor basics

It's useful to know that the UW itself considers the Seattle campus to consist of four individual campuses:  Central, East, South and West.

I photographed most of the parks of West, South and East campuses in December 2020, when there were few people around.  Because I have these photos, and haven't seen much reason to add parks to the lists I made for those campuses then, I'm set to tell you, dear Diary, about them any time.  My preference, however, at this point, is to integrate them into the deluxe sets of hikes I started last year with three of the eleven regions into which I've divided North Seattle, and have continued this year by beginning two more regions.

West Campus is part of Brooklyn as I've defined it, a sixth of one of the regions I'm covering this autumn.  Central and South Campuses are another part of that region (slightly bigger than Brooklyn), but my photos of Central Campus parks were probably less comprehensive, and anyway were on the phone stolen in July 2020; I'm waiting for Thanksgiving weekend as the earliest realistic date I can re-take them, and if campus is too crowded then, may have to wait until late December again.  East Campus, meanwhile, is in a different region whose parks I don't expect to get to this year at all.

In most respects, UW is very consistent about this list of four campuses, but there's one exception:  the numbering of parking lots.  Parking lots in East, West and South Campuses have numbers like E1, S1 or W12.  However, parking lots in Central Campus have numbers like C1 or N5.  Central Campus has way too many parks to talk about in one page anyway, so I expect to divide it the same way.  I see most of the parks of north-Central Campus as fitting into two tiers, and most of those of central-Central Campus as fitting into three columns.  Since Central Campus also has by far the most buildings, I'll probably split it the same way in this page, too.

Many of the named roads of the UW can be and are driven, and have no separated pedestrian paths.  Few if any of the drivers drive fast, so it's hardly ever actually dangerous, but to be a pedestrian at the UW is for me, at least, a minor adrenaline rush.   Another detail about those roads:  Many are named for the counties of Washington.  (King County is one of the few not included.)  In West Campus, which I'm covering first, there are only three examples:  Pacific St, Cowlitz Road and Lincoln Way.  Corresponding to the fact that many of the roads can be driven, few are gravel, but gravel (and even dirt) paths aren't so rare as to be surprising, in campus parks in general and West Campus parks in particular.

Why I'm talking about the buildings

Anyway, why is a blog about parks a place to talk about over 200 buildings?  Because you aren't a blog about parks, you're a blog about running water, dear Diary, and buildings in general have that.  I've already written about at least that many library buildings, and near as I can tell, pages I write about libraries are reliably more popular than those about parks.

In addition, please remember that when, last year, I introduced you to Seattle Center, I noted that it has in common with the present UW Seattle campus that it was shaped by a major fair, and also that both places are strongly parklike places in Seattle that aren't run by Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  Seattle Center is city-owned, while UW is state-owned, but this remains true.

Well, one important way these differ is that Seattle Center, like Seattle's parks department, has drinking water fountains outdoors.  In addition, Seattle Center has a restroom building whose doors open to the outdoors, as do many Seattle parks.  UW's Seattle campus, however, has neither of these things, with one limited exception in the South Campus, restrooms whose doors open to the outdoors, but are locked with a code requirement. [1]

So the only ways to get water on UW's Seattle campus, in general, are to bring it in, or to rely on one or more building(s).

Since your real topic, dear Diary, has always been running water, then, the UW's buildings are on-topic for you.

[1] I haven't actually tried to open every door on every building on campus.  It's conceivable, I suppose, that some door I haven't tried opens onto restrooms.  But there's a certain amount of crowdsourced information about this.  During the lockdowns, many people asked me where restrooms could be found.  Surely at least some of these people had tried some doors.  In addition, before the pandemic, a friend of mine had a parking slot in the central garage, and mentioned often seeing human Number Two and Number One in that garage.  Although this problem peaked every time the football team had a home game, presumably at least some of the problem was thanks to homeless people.  En masse, homeless people are pretty reliable as testers of doors.  Ultimately, this goes back to a principle I enunciated already in your pages in 2020.  If a water fountain, say, is buried amidst blackberry bushes, it effectively doesn't exist.  Water fountains and restrooms only matter if they're findable.  And during the lockdowns, nobody could find either on UW's campus.

Public campus, private buildings

All of that said, many of the university's buildings are in one sense or another not open to the public.  Although the university is publicly owned, as we've already discussed, you and I, dear Diary, not all publicly owned buildings are or should be open to the public, and the university actually offers an excellent set of examples as to why that might be the case.  The university owns a cyclotron and a wind tunnel, just for starters.   It also owns a plethora of buildings people live in by virtue of various kinds of leases.  It owns several buildings devoted to child care or even primary or secondary education.  Many of its buildings are primarily places for its non-academic staff to do their jobs, including places like power plants (several) which aren't normally open to the public in the outside world even when publicly owned.  Also as in most places, its theatres, stadia, and so on - its entertainment facilities, essentially - are usually locked when not in use.

The inscrutable

However, this leaves many other buildings which may or may not be open to the public.  Particularly in the northwestern U-District, the area I've called University Heights, but also in northern Brooklyn, several of the buildings shown on its map are actually rented, and so the owner's policies, as well as the university's, are relevant.  Beyond that, however, I think the main problem is that the university's policies are inscrutable; I further think that this inscrutability is intentional.

Some of this may be due to sloppy thinking.  As I've focused on this topic for the past couple of weeks, I've concluded that there are at least four audiences for information about any specific university building's hours, four groups for which the university might, in an ideal world, wish to offer different hours.

1. People specifically linked to that building as employees - employees of the university who have offices there; members or employees of athletic teams about to play in the building; etc.  People of this kind often don't care about posted hours because they have keys or equivalent access.
   
2. People specifically linked to that building as customers - students who have classes there; spectators about to watch a dance performance in the building; actual customers of things like coffee shops; etc.  People of this kind often don't care about posted hours because they take for granted that what they're there for fits within those hours.
   
3. People "affiliated with" the university, as students, faculty, or staff.
4. The general public.

Many buildings' hours signage fails to acknowledge this fact.  Many others acknowledge it only in the negative - "Authorized personnel only", most obviously.  Here are the few I found that take the trouble to differentiate hours based on which audience is involved:

As a result, as a general rule, buildings' posted hours are not reliable guidance as to whether one can lawfully enter the building.  In addition, possibly as a sign of transition between an old hours regime and a new one, an increasing number of buildings have multiple hours signs.

Notice the wrong sign as one enters, and one can become a trespasser without knowing it.  This is especially problematic at buildings, such as the Communications Building and Savery Hall, where the different hours are posted at different doors.

(That said, here's what I'm finding:  At many of those buildings, I'm not yet sure about all, the shorter schedule governs the locks.  Separately, in general, I'm not finding students in buildings on days when those buildings are officially closed.  With a few notable exceptions, but fewer than I'd expected, door schedules seem to apply both to students in general and to the general public.  I am, however, seeing students in some buildings whose hours have been shortened, after the building's official hours are over.)

More problematically, buildings' posted policies are also not reliable guidance as to whether one may enter.  Plenty of locked buildings have signs saying, in essence, "Hi!  I'm locked."  Plenty of others don't.  Plenty of unlocked buildings also have signs saying, usually more weakly, "Hi!  I'm locked.", but are in fact physically open to the public.  (Gowen Hall, just above, is one of these, as seen in that photo.  It's where the Tateuchi East Asia Library is, so the whole idea of "authorized visitors", taken literally, suggests that being literate in Chinese makes one potentially dangerous to people at the university.)  And again, plenty of others don't.

At this point it's very easy to make an obvious objection to this line of thinking.  Maybe the university just can't afford to lock all its buildings.  Its main means of locking buildings that get a lot of visitors is with card readers, a fairly modern technology that its older buildings may be hard or expensive to retrofit with.  There's evidence for this view:  some doors advertise that they're specifically closed, I infer for lack of card readers:

This, however, ignores two issues.  One is that the university is still, as recently as during the pandemic, building doors without card readers.

The text shown in that photo also clarifies why the university keeps its hours and building policies inscrutable:  So that "persons creating disruptions and/or obstructive behavior" can be subjected to the sanctions for criminal trespass, which include but aren't limited to prosecution.

And who defines disruptive or obstructive behaviour?  Well, recently, dear Diary, I told you about the Husky Union Building's definitions, but in most cases, I'm pretty sure the definition is in the eye of the beholder.  Which leads to the second issue with that objection.  Another major way university building policies are enforced, besides card readers and much less expensive, is peer pressure.  Human beings affiliated with the university explaining to human beings not affiliated with the university that the latter aren't welcome in some building.

The only dorm I think has a locked door during day or evening hours is Haggett, which is empty, awaiting demolition and replacement.  In my surveys of campus buildings, I've visited every dorm and many of the apartment buildings.  Apartment buildings' doors I tried were locked, but I only tried a few.  I didn't try the doors of any dorm except Haggett, but saw in many cases that they were quite obviously unlocked.  Some have clearly posted policies I saw that say explicitly that people outside category 1 above aren't welcome, that the only people who belong there are the specific dorm's residents and staff.  I didn't see such signs at all the dorms; perhaps some are lacking them, but also, I made a point of spending as little time as I could around the dorms, precisely because, even without anyone saying anything to me, I was well aware that as a middle-aged man, I was already outside the pale even being near those dorms.  I expect that if I'd barged into one, even if no staffer intercepted me, I'd be subjected to howls of outrage and calls to the UW Police long before I found a restroom.

In actual fact, the one time I've entered Smith Hall, the only building on the (Liberal Arts) Quad posted as closed to the public (but not locked), I was escorted out by a denizen of that building almost immediately.  (I don't consider it coincidental that signs listing building hours at Smith Hall which I saw when I did my original surveys are now all torn down.)  At one time, I spent the earlier parts of the mornings of major holidays outside, near the Communications Building.  Now, that building has been officially closed to the public as long as I've known of it, but on those major holidays, people in it often opened a back door - actually propped it open - anyway, almost certainly for the benefit of those of us waiting outside, and I went in to use the restroom several times (and, at least once, to explore; see what I mean about crowdsourcing, dear Diary?).  About half of those times, UW Police showed up before I left the restroom, presumably summoned by someone in the building other than the one who'd propped the door open.  (According to that back door yesterday, Communications is supposed to be open, though not to the public, on holidays.  The front door, which memory claims did open on holidays, currently says nothing of the sort.)

Flipside, some days ago, by no means looking or smelling my best and carrying three satchels, I passed unchallenged through the Social Work Building, Founders Hall, PACCAR Hall, and Foster Library.

Different buildings have different cultures, but offending anyone, voluntarily or otherwise, at a building posted as closed to the public, is asking for trouble.

Arbiters of trouble

Two important audiences for the behaviour of visitors unaffiliated with the university are the UW Police and a security force that UW started deploying shortly before the pandemic.

The UW Police are, in my experience, the kinds of professionals one wants to deal with when one is in trouble.  They know their laws, they seem to play fair by them.  Pleading a misleading hours sign to a UW Police officer is quite likely to have a good outcome, as long as the sign actually exists and says what one thought it said.  Flipside, UW Police are much less likely to be sympathetic if one is in a building, like Gowen Hall, posted as officially not open to the public.  But even then, in my encounters with them in the Communications Building, they consistently waited for me to finish in the restroom, and I don't remember them ever threatening me outright with arrest.

On the other hand, the security people, who are not sworn officers and are not armed, have consistently struck me as not very professional.  Savery Hall used to be an important place for me.  My first encounters with UW security came when they started enforcing new, shorter, hours for Savery, before the pandemic, and before those hours were posted.  (Which they now are, though they seem to get torn down often.)  Security people didn't consistently notice that I was in the building.  But when they did, they insisted that I leave without any justification other than their say-so.  Later, during the pandemic, I spent a lot of time on a sheltered bench outside the Bank of America Executive Education Center (much of that time, writing you, dear Diary).  Security people at least thrice threatened to have the UW Police arrest me for vagrancy, on the grounds that someone in charge of that building didn't want me there.  This reliably ended embarrassingly for the security people, with the summoned police officer patiently explaining that vagrancy laws aren't enforceable and the UW campus is a public place.  But these incidents didn't make my life any easier.

My methods now

I can't write over 200 books of hours, or even for however many buildings have open doors at all.

So I'm using a four-step process.  

1. I've already listed everything on UW's map that I consider a building, grouped by location.
2. For each building, I've visited and summarised what's posted about access and hours.
3. For each building, I've visited during normal business hours (and specifically during posted hours, if any), and seen whether whatever I interpret as the front door opens when I try.
   
4. Whatever post-processing is needed.  This includes verifying UW ownership (significant for West Campus, trivial for Central and South Campuses, and I haven't yet checked for East Campus).  It also includes trying doors during stated hours on weekends and during evenings; so far this is done for Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, but not for weekday evenings.
   

I'm not sure how soon I'll finish this work, but necessarily not today.  In the meantime, dear Diary, I wanted to write this so that what I say about the West Campus parks will make more sense.

That said, one important thing:  My park maps show UW buildings, like other public buildings, in blue (if open to the public) or, I think, teal (if not).  For the UW buildings, on the maps I'm using for the parks, blue merely indicates that the building is physically open (and not residential); it doesn't indicate that the public is welcome there.  In this page, the maps will be more complicated.

All for now, dear Diary.  I've finally got Brooklyn mapped, so expect to start writing about its parks today.  Happy hours until then.

Low Technology

Dear Diary,

One of the things I've been doing to prepare both for hiking in the rain and for the possibility I'll become homeless again is buying ball point pens.

I bought several gel pens with the stimulus money.  I can see why stores prefer to sell them:  they're much more expensive than ball point pens, and they don't last as long.  But the particular thing that matters to me is this:

Turns out, according to Wikipedia, gel pens use water-soluble inks, so this would've been predictable if I'd bothered with the topic.  In contrast, ball point pens use oil-soluble inks, so when today I was trapped by thorny vines on undeveloped 38th Ave NE, and had to set my bags down to deal with the situation, my notes got wrinkled on their bottom edges, but didn't dissolve beyond recall:

I got these pens by doing a study.  This particular study advertised how much it paid heavily, but hid the fact that it paid only in Amazon dollars, not real dollars, in the fine print.  So I had 75 Amazon dollars, no help at all in paying rent, but when I was unable to buy even red ball point pens at local stores, let alone green or purple ones, I remembered them, and spent half of the 75 getting those three colours (including shipping).

I don't actually think of myself nearly as often any more as old-fashioned, as I used to.  These days I generally pick whatever looks more sensible to me.  I can't afford to subscribe to the newspaper until I get a lasting job, and it's looking like, because I've had so many jobs that didn't last in the past, I'll probably never get another one that does last.  (This is also why I still pay shipping fees to Amazon.)  That said, I use a print newspaper in taking door shots of restrooms, water fountains and similar things because it's a convenient way of setting a visible terminus post quem, not because I have some objection to digital news.

But it's still true that I don't object to older technology, such as ball point pens and print newspapers, just because it's older.

Anyway, dear Diary, I look forward to telling you what those notes mean, and the others too, but I'm really, really tired, and tonight I'm going to relax, listen to music, and read instead.  I hope to return by Sunday, maybe even sooner, but for now, have a happy weekend, and wish one to anyone who reads you too.

Three Hikes in Ravenna, part II: Northeast

Dear Diary,

This part's title is actually untrue:  I've recently made five hikes to this part of Ravenna.  So let's hurry up and get started.  Here's the map:

 

One thing I want you to notice on that map, dear Diary, is that dozens of homeowners north-northeast of Ravenna Park don't have back yards, they have back forest, and near as I can tell (this was the topic of today's hike), they pretty much don't treat it as their property.  That doesn't mean they want you hiking into it, but does mean that in every case I got the chance to look at, there's a pretty sharp dividing line between the areas they actually use, and the areas they seem to be aware they're stewards of.

Today's hike was also a lesson in the reliability of Open Street Map.  Those gray blotches reproduce OSM's map as best I could, because it checked out everywhere I was able to look.

On October 8 (hike #1), I went and visited most of the properties I knew to belong to the City of Seattle in the entire region, including this piece of it.

Olga Park (RB9 on map)

As before, I've numbered the blocks of Ravenna Boulevard with the numbers I used, counting from Ravenna Park towards Green Lake Park, in "Ravenna Boulevard", a much earlier page in you, dear Diary.

I'd forgotten in writing the previous part of this page that I did take one photograph of Ravenna Boulevard, of the specific extra-wide block of it that has the separate name Olga Park.  I took it because I was pleased to see that when Olga Park was swept, they didn't also sweep the sign declaring that name:

Ravenna Park

On this hike, I didn't take many photos in this park, other than of the water fountains and restroom doors.  (As in past hike series, the photos are in a shared folder at my Google Drive.)  I know perfectly well that I've shown you lots of photos of Ravenna Park in the past, dear Diary.  But I was pleased to notice that the alleged construction near the shelter there a) is supposed to be completed fairly soon and b) at the moment isn't fencing off the actual shelter.

Also, you may find this photo of just how the water fountain in "lower" Ravenna Park is malfunctioning mildly amusing:

Also, this time I found about about Ravenna Triangle, a tiny Seattle Department of Transportation property at one of the southeastern corners of gigantic Ravenna Park.  Notice two things about it, dear Diary:  It's nicely landscaped (something SDOT is sometimes good at), and the bench in the photo is on the parks department's side of the property (benches are something I haven't yet noticed SDOT doing).

Ravenna Ravine (A on map)

The core of the area where all those homeowners take care of woods is a reasonably big area where the city does instead.  It's in a maze of dead ends and has no plumbing, so I'm not sure I've visited it since May 2020, when I was telling you, dear Diary, about all the parks in the general vicinity of where I then lived.

So here are more photos of Ravenna Ravine, showing that at least here the city's Department of Parks and Recreation has not installed a new water fountain.  As before, I found it impossible to get further into the park than a few steps.

One reason I set out, last summer, to visit each city property known to me, was that I wanted to find all the Seattle Public Utilities parks.  SPU really likes to parkify its properties.  But it turns out most things with SPU's name on them in North Seattle are not only not parkified, they're invisible - sewers, standpipes, you name it.  However, it sometimes turns out that they're in interesting places, and so it proved this time.  Around the corner from the non-entrance to Ravenna Ravine I'd visited this time and before, on 24th Ave, there's a dead end on 61st St. to which I went looking for the fictional address SPU had used, and there I found a sign:

"Habitat restoration.  Please do not enter or climb on bank.  Thank you!"  Now I belatedly realise that this is actually a dead end into one of the private parts of Ravenna Ravine, not the city park.  So at least one homeowner is taking stewardship seriously.

Park Home Circle (B on map)

This is a pretty good tiny playground for kids, but really shines at Christmas time, when I hope I'll still be housed.  Meanwhile, another photo:

And that was it for my hiking of this area on October 8.  I went south and got onto the Burke-Gilman Trail and away.

On October 12 (hike #2), I came to make up for the one area I hadn't reached before sunset on October 8.

17th Ave NE Center Strip

Yes, that's what SDOT calls one of its more boring parks.  No fine landscaping here.

Two blocks of this park are in the area on this map, three in the one covered in the next part of this page.  I took one photo per block, plus one extra, but that one is south of here.  I didn't get the idea of really varying the shots much until the third block, too.  Sorry, dear Diary; I hope tomorrow to show you more interesting pictures than these.

On October 14 (hike #3), I came back intending to visit the areas I'd noticed as worth attention on Open Street Map.  There was only one of these in this part of Ravenna.

Traffic circle, 17th Ave & 63rd St (C on map)

Wow, wouldn't it be nice if all traffic circles, which I experience as terrifying places where no driver ever signals a turn, were as pleasant as this one!  It's got nice landscaping:

nice paths, adding up to a significant chunk of its area, with one nice bench and several things that clearly belong to that genre of street furniture designed primarily so as to be uncomfortable enough that homeless people won't monopolise them, otherwise known as cutting off your nose to spite your face, well anyway, it's got furniture:

And it's even got a Little Free Library:

The safety cone visible in the second photo and the truck in this third are because it's also now got construction nearby.  A "sanican" is, in fact, across the street from it.  Nevertheless, I found that even as tiny a park as this, even with construction noise, could soothe me, and I recommend it.

So that was the only one I'd noticed on Open Street Map, but as I walked away, I chanced to notice something all on my own.  I'm not very observant, dear Diary, so I was pretty proud of finding it.

Battlement bench (D on map)

No bus goes down 63rd St or, for that matter, 21st Ave, so by Seattle logic, no bench is needed on those streets, but someone saw fit to put one there, and not only that, to give people who sat there something to look at.  I recommend this one, too, to anyone who comes to these parts to see the traffic circle done right.

Yesterday (hike #4), making my second attempt at the map up top, I noticed something on Open Street Map I hadn't noticed before.  Well, actually, a bunch of somethings, so I incorporated them into yesterday's hike.  But again, only one was in this map's area:

Ravenna Trollbooth

Given my own interest in fantasy - I long intended to write a history of it - of course I came and looked.  It isn't actually very easy to find, but fortunately the artist puts the exact address conspicuously on his website.  Anyway, here's a photo:

One result of going six places in Ravenna yesterday was that I forgot to go look more thoroughly at the woods around Ravenna Ravine; another was that I ran out of time to do so.  So I finally convinced myself to come back today (hike #5) and do the job right before writing this.

In the first area, every single place I tried was just as obviously private property as it was woods.  I didn't think I had any business taking photos.

Turns out the easiest path between the areas where streets contact the woods is through Ravenna Park.  So I also investigated two more things I'd noticed in the park as rendered by Open Street Map.  One turned out to be a large slab of concrete on the western side of the park.  The only obvious thing about it was two basketball hoops; a full court would occupy about a third of the space, and I have no clue what the other two thirds were intended for.  The only attractive thing about it was the couple using the basketball hoops, so I took no photos.

The other thing didn't turn out any more attractive, but I figured in case anyone else's curiosity was whetted by "Ravenna Park Sulfur Spring" (F on the map above), I'd better photograph it anyway and save some people the trip.

As I walked away, I did indeed notice a faint smell of sulfur.  Huh.

Anyway.  There are two bridges at the south end of Ravenna Ave as it reaches the park.  One takes people to 61st St northwest of the park, the other to 60th St east of the park.  I thought from Open Street Map and what I remembered from the King County parcel viewer (which for some reason won't load on my phone) that those bridges marked the park's boundary.  So I took photos looking northish from each of them.  This one, G on the map, actually probably looks into private woods:

But once I got home and could look at the parcel viewer again, turned out the other is parks department property, an inaccessible part of Ravenna Park across that bridge from the rest.  H on the map.

A railing of the bridge is visible on the lower left of that photo.

The few remaining places on the east side of the woods were as un-photo-worthy as those on the west had been.

Well, all for tonight, dear Diary.  Tomorrow I hope to finish, or at least nearly finish, surveying the buildings of UW's Seattle campus, and then come home and tell you about the remaining part of Ravenna.  Until then, a good night and a good day.