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

Dear Diary,

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

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

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

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

Or wait...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Night Long, Questions Edition, part II: Official

Dear Diary,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Night Long, Questions Edition, part I: Unofficial

Dear Diary,

This is a story I think is worth telling, but it's more than a little disgusting about Number One.  I've tried to make it a bit less so by letting English Wikipedia links do most of the talking about, for example, this.

Last Saturday, I had to do laundry, but also wanted to go to Bitter Lake Playfield to get the construction-related photos I'd forgotten to get on previous visits.  Suddenly it occurred to me that Bitter Lake Playfield was one of the parks I'd heard had 24-hour restrooms, and is sort of near Carkeek Park, whose restrooms' 24-hourness I'd seen for myself, so I should do an "All Night Long" hike.

Well, I got to Bitter Lake around (checks to confirm, OK, I'm not senile yet) 5:30 pm.  Now, September 5th was before Labor Day this year, so I figured maybe park restrooms were still closing at 9 pm, so I had to find things to do until 10:30 or so.

The construction photos filled quite a lot of that time, since one of them was to be of the playground, which was never deserted that night before sunset.  So along about 8 pm I headed for Carkeek Park.

Now, one thing I failed to do before I left changed the whole night for me.  My mother had taught me, when quite young, that I should always go potty before going out.  But I didn't want to take my satchels into Bitter Lake Playfield's restrooms, nor leave them unattended in the crowd.  So I didn't, on this occasion, heed my mother's advice.

Well, everything went fine until about mile fifty of the hundred-mile trek, that is, about mile 2 out of 3 or so, somewhere on NW 117th St, I started to experience this.  At extraordinary length.  When I started you, dear Diary, I can remember isolated brief episodes of that really shocking me, one actually in one of Laurelhurst Community Center's restrooms, another at Northeast branch Library waiting for a call from Anna Patrick.

The problem is an extremely common one in older men.  Sometime around 2016, my first doctor on Medicaid, whom I was already starting to dislike, correctly diagnosed me with this, and prescribed this.  That was in response to an isolated example of this, which also got me kicked out of Scarecrow Video's doorway.  Now, the thing is, that drug is supposed to make it easier to do Number One, which I figured then was the last thing I needed.  But by 2021, things had gotten enough worse that I really wanted my second Medicaid doctor to revive the prescription.

Unfortunately, the new prescription had an expiration date, which even more unfortunately came a few months after I was kicked off Medicaid for making too much money.  Soon after that, the money went away too.  All this in 2025.

So while what happened on the way to Carkeek Park was a shock, it shouldn't have been.  I'd really messed up.

Anyway, when I finally got to Carkeek Park's restrooms, I discovered that I'd effectively filled my clothes as if they were this, and, worse, that I actually retained sensory memories of that kind of clothing.  This is not as shocking as it would be for most people, thanks to a long-lasting (until age 7) primary case of this, but it still made a bad situation worse.

So, Carkeek's Shelter 2, the immense WPA one, being available, I went and vegetated until I was sick of the company of my own thoughts.  The deal with Carkeek Park's restrooms being 24 hours, as our frenemy Rachel Schulkin eventually figured out, is that the parks maintenance guys at the ends of their shifts were supposed to close the gate across the only road into Carkeek.  Theoretically they should first have closed the restrooms, but they didn't see any point.

Well, so I figured if the gate was already closed, I'd know the restrooms were still 24 hours.  But the gate didn't close, and didn't close, and finally around 11 pm, on my third hike out there, I saw a car from PanAmerican Security enter the park.  So I squelched back, much slower than the car, and it turns out this is what the doors to Carkeek Park's restrooms look like at night now:

So there I was, half done, and of course the doors to Bitter Lake Playfield's three single-user stalls were locked when I arrived.  I'd only heard about those being 24 hours, mostly from homeless peers, but it was still a disappointment.

And, as it turned out, a mildly pressing disappointment; my this, itself fairly shocked by recent events, was nevertheless starting to make noises again.  Obviously I'd have to walk home - I was far too smelly to take a bus.  So I'd stop at one of the official 24-hour restrooms.

But why not take these lemons and make lemonade?  By no means is View Ridge Playfield anywhere near my way home, but if I could get there the same night, it would be a clean sweep.  All three of the 24-hour restrooms in North Seattle of which I'd learnt unofficially.

Now, at that point I wasn't thinking very rationally.  But I expected View Ridge's restrooms to be closed too.  I figured at some level the parks maintenance guys had been insubordinate in both cases.  (My best guess, based on how they talked about View Ridge, was that they took great pride in being able to keep it open without any vandalism.)  Maybe the parks department had sort of militarised, and there was no room left for anyone not a team player.

But no!  I still can't show you, dear Diary, photos of View Ridge Playfield's restrooms closed.  Maybe my e-mail to Christina Hirsch the next day was the first they'd heard that those restrooms were still 24 hours, maybe another security service contract was executed, and maybe they're closed right now.

But also, maybe not.  The easy answer, and the most seductive to me at first, was classism.  Carkeek Park is in a richer neighbourhood.

But there are other plausible answers.  I'd witnessed Carkeek Park's restrooms being open, true, but I'd also witnessed loud, late-night parties at Carkeek Park.  Maybe the neighbours were complaining.  I've never witnessed a more plausible basis for complaint about results of 24-hour restrooms at View Ridge - well, more plausible than me.

Maybe, far from militarising, the park maintenance guys didn't mind handing over the late-night Carkeek work, but weren't going to tolerate anyone messing with their pride and joy, View Ridge. 

The one thing I know is that it didn't result from high-level thought about where 24-hour restrooms would do the most good.  Because such high-level thought couldn't possibly miss the suitability of Bitter Lake Playfield for the job, one block from Aurora as it is.

Part II a week from now, I hope, dear Diary.  In which one of the questions is about the backward and (View Ridge) incomplete way Parks advertises its 24-hour restrooms. 

Good night, dear Diary. 

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.

Past hikes of North Seattle parks in these pages

Dear Diary,

On December 18, 2024, I decided to update this page, which I originally wrote in you on September 3, 2024.  The original page follows, until the obvious heading announces the update.

Dear Diary,

Ever since I signed up for job-hunting sites, you've been much more popular than you had been in the years when you were actually relevant to people's lives.  So I don't have a clue who reads you any more, and to what extent they're familiar with what I've actually done in the past.

Part of this is my own doing.  I compiled a publication history, 85K of text, put it onto Google Drive, and link to it in some of my resumes and in my LinkedIn profile.  Some of your pages, dear Diary, to which it refers, get visited pretty often.

But with regard to the hikes of North Seattle parks which I resumed yesterday, that history is incomplete.  So here goes.

One reason for this page to exist, besides completeness, is to clarify my terms for these hikes.  Those are, from most to fewest total places visited:  everything hike (trying to visit every park or park-like area); water fountain hike (visiting a list of parks with water fountains); restroom hike (visiting a list of parks with restrooms).

Finding plumbing - a series of 2020 hikes

As you remember, dear Diary, when I started writing you, it was because Seattle's then-mayor, Jenny Durkan, had advised homeless people like me (then) to use the parks' restrooms and water fountains to meet our needs during the lockdowns, but I'd found that the restrooms were often closed, and most of the water fountains weren't running.  Initially I focused on the most obvious parks near where I slept in Laurelhurst, and on Magnuson Park (which isn't near anywhere, but is anyway not utterly distant from there).  However, I eventually became curious:  Was what I was experiencing typical, or was my area an outlier?

At that time, I hadn't gathered many sources of information on Seattle parks.  It didn't take long to become acquainted with the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's website, which I mined intensively and then critiqued.  But I acquired other sources largely as a result of these hikes.  Also, I quickly found that the website wasn't entirely reliable as to which parks had restrooms or water fountains.  So my goal, in these hikes, became to find absolutely every park in the areas I was hiking, find out whether they had plumbing, and write about them, possibly with photographs.  As a result, many North Seattle parks without plumbing are only documented in your pages, dear Diary, in the pages devoted to these hikes.

When I set out, I hoped to find a border to the "Durkan Drought" quickly, but I never did.  So I ended up hiking all of North Seattle.  By the time I finished that, I sort of had an explanation for the drought, so didn't need to go further.  As it turned out, the area I started from pretty much had a monopoly on closed restrooms, but nearly all the water fountains across North Seattle were shut off.  Strangely, the exceptions, the working water fountains, were geographically clustered.

Before I got all the initial hikes written into your pages, dear Diary, someone stole my phone, with all the remaining photos I hadn't yet shown you.  As a result, I had to re-visit a lot of parks.  Also, as I learnt more, I wanted to re-visit other parks, and added topics (including waterways, street ends, and park shelters).  So the list of pages devoted to this series of hikes is basically a great big mess, which is why I left most of it out of that publication history.  But here it is:

• Go North, Aging Man!
• Ravennawards 
• Back East, Where the Gardens Are Pretty
• Down by the Canal 
• Top of the City, Part I
• Top of the City, Part II 
• South to and from Northgate
• The Jackson Park Perimeter Trail
• Ravenna Boulevard 
• A Shower at Green Lake 
• At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work? 
• Past Work and Gas Works
• History and Parks, part I 
• History and Parks, part II
• A Heavy Mile Stone
• A Lazy Day on Loyal Heights 
• The Ballard Seacoast: Parks Not Parks', part I
• The Ballard Seacoast: Parks Not Parks', part II 
• What Can a Hill Do with a Crown?
• Lake Union's North Shore: Waterways and Street Ends 
• South of North Once More, part I
• South of North Once More, part II: Woodland Park 
• Bad Apples in the Bonny Green Wood
• Blue Ridge, Land of Mystery 
• Top of the City, Part III
• To a Land of Water and Honey 
• Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us!
• Hygiene Is a Luxury I Can't Afford 
• "Standing Room Only", a page with five parts listed in the publication history, about park shelters
• The Kingdom of the Winds
• Six Parks in Search of Another 
• Meadowbrook Pond
• To the Beaches! 
• The End of the Tour
• Two Last Strays 
• "North Seattle Street Ends", a page with nine parts listed in the publication history

This is not the last time I set out on an "everything hike", but it's the last everything hike I've so far completed.

Checking a plumbing map - January 2021

In December 2020 I became aware of a City of Seattle Department of Human Services map professing to show which restrooms would be open in winter 2020-2021.  I decided to see how accurate it was.  It proved to be a substantially less reliable guide than the list of restrooms the parks department had promised to keep open in winter 2019-2020; in other words, the parks department did nothing differently because of the lockdowns, when it came to winter restrooms.  The pages in you, dear Diary, about these hikes, culminate in "How to Lie to the Homeless", a page with three parts.

This was basically a restroom hike, except that the map also mapped locations where charities had open restrooms, and locations where there wasn't a restroom, but was a "sanican", so the total areas I visited were more numerous than in a normal restroom hike.

All the pages are listed in the publication history.

Regional hikes - May 2021

This was the first series of hikes I tackled while housed.  Hiking housed has both advantages and disadvantages, as compared to hiking homeless.  It's much easier to take buses when I'm not smelly, for example; but it's much harder to get much done, having to go home each night.  When it's raining, it's much harder to set my satchels down and rest, but whether or not it's raining, steering a cart, which does enable rest under most circumstances (because it props my satchels up above the wet pavement), is too annoying.  (The kind of cart I used has endless wheel malfunctions, basically planned obsolescence, near as I can tell.)

So I decided to play to the strengths of housed hiking and do a series of regional everything hikes, visiting most City of Seattle properties, not just parks.  I soon expanded that to park-like places shown, primarily, on Open Street Map.  In May 2021 I more or less finished three regions, the ones headed in the map below with the numbers 43, 32 and 49 (which represent total areas visited).

One ancillary purpose of this series of hikes was to provide at least one photograph of most things, and especially of the many parks of which I hadn't previously shown you, dear Diary, any photographs at all.  So basically, for parks without plumbing, this series is best if the park's region is covered, otherwise the 2020 series above.

Finally, I'd gotten tired of the boring page titles I'd used for the January 2021 hikes, and tried some from a poem.  Those fell spectacularly flat, so I went back to boring titles, and have stayed there ever since, for the most part. 

But it quickly became clear that we were in another year of Durkan Drought (as I would've known if I'd still been homeless), so I switched gears.

The region headed 43

•  While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part I
• While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part II 
• All in the Dry Month of May
• A Roguish Pair of Eyes 
• Another Hike in Wallingford
• A Hike Near the I-5 Bridge, which I should've called "A Hike in Latona"
• Another Hike along Lake Union and the Fremont Cut
• Another Hike in Fremont 

The region headed 32

•  Hikes in southern NW: Introduction
• A Hike along Difficult Market Street 
• A Hike in Ross 
• A Hike in Southeastern Ballard
• A Hike along Easy Market Street 
• A Hike along Ballard's South Shore
  

The region headed 49

•  A Tale of Three Lake Cities
• Almost done... 
• A Visit to Little Brook Park
• A Hike in Jackson Park, part I 
• A Hike in Jackson Park, part II
• A Hike near Jackson Park 
• A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part I
• A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part II 
• A Hike across the Pinehurst Plateau
• Another Hike in Lake City 
• A Visit to Hubbard Homestead
• A Hike in Northgate, part I 
• A Hike in Northgate, part II
• A Hike in Victory - and Defeat 
• A Hike in Maple Leaf
• A Hike along Banner 
  

Water fountains, year 2 - May 2021

As I said, after three regions it was obvious that there was a new Durkan Drought going on, and it was rather more evil than the previous one.  In 2020, they'd had three plumbers working on turning water fountains on when the lockdowns began, and they just left on the fountains those plumbers had gotten to before stopping.  But by 2021, they'd figured out that homeless people were camping in or near parks in order to get access to the plumbing.  So they carefully turned water fountains on only in parks that didn't have open restrooms.

Late in my work on writing these hikes up I found out the rationale for the droughts.  Durkan's administration had willfully misread the CDC's advice on keeping water fountains clean.  The CDC had explicitly said water fountains should be washed once per day, but someone in Durkan's administration chose to believe that that really meant once per user, and explained (as if it needed explaining) that that was impossible.  No Seattle mayor is friendly to the homeless, but Jenny Durkan really went way out of her way to be hostile to homeless people, and this is just one of many examples.

Quite a few of the pages listed above under the regional hikes contributed to this set of hikes' concern with water fountains, but I don't have time this week to re-read and figure out which ones.

• Few Restrooms Closed, Only One Water Fountain Running in Today's Hike
• Public Water Fountains in North Seattle: Some Maps 
• Park Restrooms in North Seattle: Some Maps
• Running Water Fountains FOUND in N, and northern NW 
• Yesterday's Hike in More Detail
• NW finished; one more water fountain; one more closed restroom pair 
• A Different Hike: Seven Restrooms Closed, Two Fountains Running in Southern NE
• Details of southern NE Seattle, part I
• Details of southern NE Seattle, part II 
• Last Hike: More open restrooms, fewer running fountains
• Final May 2021 Water Fountain and Restroom Maps 
• Some explanations and links concerning the water fountain situation

There was a coda to this.  That summer got really hot, and Durkan finally had to back down from her two-year attempt to cure Seattleites of water addiction.

• Another RUNNING street fountain in today's hike
• Another running street fountain 
• New water fountain hikes coming
• Credit Where It's Due: Downtown Street Fountains 
• Foolish Mortal Tackles Street Fountains Again
• Today's hike: Most fountains running in southern NW 
• More details of yesterday's hike 
• Seattle's water fountains and the June heat wave 

"Foolish mortal" in the title is how I signal that a page corrects mistakes of mine.

Regional hikes redux - October 2022

I tackled two more regions from the eleven mapped above in autumn 2022.  I quickly gave up on the one headed 21 on the map, the far northwest of Seattle, because it was too hard to get there, and because that region had too many green areas on Open Street Map which turned out to be hard and time-consuming to find.  So basically I could get one OSM green area done per day, and that seemed excessive attention to a region that has almost no parks department plumbing.

On the other hand, I did a lot, but not quite all, of the other region, the U-District writ large, the one headed 33 on the map above.  Walking around there made me aware of changes at the UW that seemed to me to add up to an attempt to ensure that people like me, homeless people who'd basically spent our waking hours there before the pandemic, couldn't possibly do that again.  So when I got to campus, I started another series about UW buildings, and completed it for the West Campus, basically west of 15th Avenue NE.  However, this discouraged me considerably, and took so long that the autumn quarter ended, and I'd have to go photograph building hours all over again in January.

So the part of this region that I didn't cover is basically UW's Central and South campuses.  (The East Campus is in the region headed 23, instead.)

• New hikes of North Seattle
• Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna 
• Three Hikes in Ravenna, part I: Northwest
• Three Hikes in Ravenna, part II: Northeast 
• Three Hikes in Ravenna, part III: Southeast
• Four or More Hikes in University Heights 
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part I: Northwest
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part II: West 
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part III: Southwest and Its Sweeps
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part IV: Centre 
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part V: East
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part VI: Southeast 

Restroom hikes, February to March 2023

On my days off from my last job to date, as a tax preparer, I hiked; and when tax season was over, I wrote the hikes up.  I didn't succeed in visiting all the parks with restrooms before the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation started opening the closed restrooms back up.

• Happy Birthday, Dear Diary! Seattle Parks Lied Again!
• My February Hikes
• My March Hikes
• Truth and fantasy about park restrooms in winter 

And that's the last hiking I did for you, dear Diary, until Monday, Labor Day, except for what's told here:  Seattle Parks Is Trying to Tell the Truth. Will I Survive the Shock?.  I hope to tell you about Monday's hike tomorrow.  Until then, good night and good day.

Water fountains, September 2024

Well, I wrote up Monday's hike and one more.  But, possibly because I'd chosen mystifying titles, nobody was reading those.  So it was easy to transfer the time I'd intended to devote to them to the page I'd planned about the buses.  And I've had basically no interest, this month, in finding out what's happening to park restrooms this winter.  I'm sorry, dear Diary, but not actually sorry enough to go hiking in the rain.  As other pages in you from earlier this year mention, I'm now in school, trying to put ever more distance between myself and homelessness, and this right now is my last long break before August.

Perhaps then, I'll do what I tried to do this past September:  find what I called then and still would call a "baseline".  Find out how the parks are operating in summer, so that if that winter I hike them again, I'll be able to tell what's different.  For that matter, locating water fountains (which are rather more mobile than restrooms) while the weather is nice.  If I can get that done next August and September, I can in turn realistically do winter hikes, after I graduate, next December.

Anyway.  Here are the two pages:

• Thyme Patch Park on Monday
• Bitter Lake Reservoir Park Yesterday and Froula Park Today

The first covers most of the parks in NW, the second a couple of parks in far north Seattle.

And while you've probably figured out the point, dear Diary, in case those titles confuse any more readers, you might as well tell them that after my happening on Thyme Patch Park on the first hike, I decided to call the rest of the pages after parks without plumbing that I hadn't visited for way too long.  The second page's title hammers on something I've mentioned to you before, that Seattle actually has parks (those exact two), not that far away, built on reservoir land, but without their own plumbing.

Well, good night, and good days and nights until we meet again, dear Diary.

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

Dear Diary,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cowen Park

Ravenna Park

Burke-Gilman Trail, 30th Ave fountain

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

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

Burke-Gilman Trail, 47th St fountain

Former University Methodist Church, former street fountain

Christie Park

University Playground (including the photo above)

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

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

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

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

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

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.