Bellevue's Downtown Park and News from the University District

Dear Diary,

I lied to you a little bit in splitting up the two pages I'm writing today.  In reality, I'd gotten very confused about downtown Bellevue's geography the night I saw Avatar, and came away thinking Open Street Map had made up fountain c out of whole cloth (because I'd looked at the wrong intersection) and thinking Bellevue Downtown Park (a specific park in downtown Bellevue, that is) had lots of water fountains.  It doesn't, actually, have six of them, as I came away thinking, but does have four, which is more than any park in North Seattle except Woodland and Green Lake parks.  So my point is that yesterday, Downtown Park was part of my planned itinerary, not just a stop on my way home as I implied this morning.  So here goes.

Bellevue Downtown Park

This park is pretty much the pride and joy of Bellevue's Department of Parks & Community Services.  So please excuse me, dear Diary, in a bit of park appreciation before getting to its water fountains.

Part of what confused me Monday night is that the only map the department makes available of the whole park, in the park, is one that explains in great detail that half of what it shows is future plans:

(Nor do I see a more present-focused map offered at the department's page about Downtown Park.)

So it was easy for me to figure that every time I got something wrong, it was because the map was ahead of its time.  The original reason I was going to split the pages I'm writing today was that I was going to fulminate about Open Street Map assuming a map of a future park was good enough for their current map.  Stupid me, no, Open Street Map was quite right in most particulars.  I ended up splitting it anyway, partly to give Downtown Park more prominence and partly because this page is photo-heavy.

Anyway, though, the core of the park is a circular (I assume) promenade, whose pavement is covered with sand or small gravel.  Most of the time, what's inside the circle is grass, but there's water flowing between the grass and the promenade the whole way:

And for the quarter-circle nearest the playground, the grass largely goes away, and they've set up a waterfall, much delighting the ducks as well as the children:

Oh, yes, playground.  If one does a search for ' "water fountains" "downtown Bellevue" ', most of the results don't allude to the broken street fountains at all, they're about either Downtown Park or Inspiration Playground, which has a map that doesn't try to instill doubt by referring to future plans:

And that map shows - I know this will be difficult for you to believe, dear Diary, of a park named Downtown:

Yes, they built restrooms not only adjacent to, but difficult to approach except through, the playground!  Those restrooms were also open Monday night, after 9 P.M.; Seattle's park restrooms close at 7 P.M. in October.

And yes, they have a restroom specifically designed for toddlers, too.

I'm worried about running up against Blogspot photo limits, so won't show you all the water fountains, dear Diary, but they're in the following places:  the northeast corner of the park, where one enters from Bellevue Way NE and NE 4th St; the northernmost point above the promenade, where Open Street Map currently shows one, but at street level not promenade level; next to the restrooms (a three-bowl water fountain, one of which overshot its bowl Monday night but had been fixed by yesterday), also shown by Open Street Map; and, um, 

one at the promenade's southernmost point that, unlike all the rest, flows only weakly, making it hard to drink from.

Anyway, can you believe it, dear Diary?  A downtown park with restrooms open after 9 P.M.?

The way home

Well, anyway, after that it was back to Seattle for me, but a very long hike.  I was very amused by a sign I saw at the last, or first, exits from the 520 Trail:

At least one town hereabouts agrees with me and Lezlie Lowe that public restrooms are a good thing to have around, not a bad one.

Anyway, once I was finally back on dry land, I decided to get to Ravenna Boulevard by way of Brooklyn Ave, figuring it would be less crowded.  Not very far north, this caught my eye:

Sound Transit is planning to build a barren windswept plaza, but apparently make it a little less windswept by planting some trees around it.  Um, one cheer for Sound Transit?

Further north...  Dear Diary, as I write up last week's hikes downtown, I'm going to be complimenting rapid construction being done by private enterprise.  Well, not all private enterprise is quite so efficient.  It's been years, guys.

Still further north, something caught my eye by not being there:

I thought University Heights, the building, was city-owned, but it isn't in either the 2020 or the 2022 real property report, so I thought wrong, and I should stop kvetching about their restrooms not being public.  But the plaza is a Seattle park, University Heights Plaza.  And in that park, during the pandemic, there were several "sanican"s and a hand-washing station.  Not any more.

I figured maybe the "sanican"s had been relocated, so I circled U-Heights, in the process coming upon the original Seattle Street Sink, another pandemic innovation.  This must be on land owned by U-Heights rather than the parks, since the then-mayor made it clear that she considered street sinks utterly illegal:

For what I think is the first time since I first saw it there, I tried it yesterday night, and to my amazement it was still running:

So, um, two cheers for U-Heights?

Anyway, dear Diary, that was yesterday's hike.  I'm about to write a third page, but then it might be a little while before you hear from me again.  Happy days and nights until then.

How to Lie to the Homeless, part IIA

Dear Diary,

As I told you yesterday, I went to both the Broadview and the Lake City branches of the Seattle Public Library that day.  Although it was the first day of re-opening for the Ballard branch, which I was near that day, I didn't go there.

So although I did take pictures of the water fountains, showing that despite the signs saying they're closed:

the reason the librarians would give, if asked, for why one fountain at each of those branches is wrapped up, as one has been for months at the Ballard branch (whose restrooms and fountains have been open for about a year, after all), is social distancing.  The other fountain at each branch:

is running fine.  But as I was saying, although I took pictures of the fountains at each, I didn't even bother to investigate the restrooms, settling for my own seeing that they were open.  After all, a library probably wouldn't stay open for a full day if they weren't.  What I was really after at the libraries was these:

Yep, dictionary definitions.

I believe that I presently own massive representatives of three major lexicographic traditions:  Merriam-Webster, whose publications go back to 1806, the Oxford English Dictionary (1884), and the American Heritage Dictionary (1969).  Unfortunately, since, as I told you, dear Diary, in "A Visit to Everyday Music" last month, I haven't had the chance to excavate much from my storage yet, I've had to put off for a very long time a page in you that needed dictionary references.  Finally I gave up on consulting the books I owned and settled for those I could get through the slowly re-opening Seattle Public Library.

This even though my trust in librarians has been eroded a good bit recently.  That misleading sign shown above isn't the only one they've put up.  Here's another, from "Hike 11B":

I noted at the time that this claim that University Heights offered public restrooms was false.  And later in that page concluded that this falsehood was based on a different definition of "restroom" from that I use.

This issue of the definition of "restroom" has also come up every time I mention the "Portland Loo" at Ballard Commons, which the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation bills as a restroom, a claim I consistently have doubted.

So I wanted to consult recent dictionaries - more recent than those I own, actually - to find out whether I was just being an old fogey, or whether our city government is actually trying to re-define an English word.

I consulted two physical books and three online sources.

1. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Reference Center (SPL's access), which incorporates a Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
2. A paperbound 2016 edition of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (SPL's copies).
3.  Oxford English Dictionary (SPL's access)
4. A paperbound 2012 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary (SPL's copies).
5. The American Heritage Dictionary (SPL's access).  This is supposedly just an electronic version of 4 above, but they do differ.

So what do they say about the relatively recent term "restroom" ?

1. a room or suite of rooms providing personal facilities (as toilets)
2. a room or suite of rooms that includes sinks and toilets
3. Originally: a room (usually in a public building or workplace) set aside for rest and relaxation (now rare). In later use (U.S.): a lavatory in a public building or workplace.
4. A room with toilets and sinks for public use.
5. ProQuest, which hosts the e-book in question, repeatedly failed to find this definition.

So two out of four think a restroom has to have a sink, one arguably doesn't, and one punts.  What does the OED have to say about "lavatory" ?

1. holder
2. holder
3. Definition 5b:
   
   A room, cubicle, etc., having a toilet or toilets as well as washing facilities
   
   Definition 5c:
   
   A fixed receptacle into which a person can urinate or defecate
4. holder
5. holder
    

(Apparently Blogspot won't allow incomplete numbered lists.  Sorry, dear Diary.)

So the online Merriam-Webster doesn't require sinks at all.  The physical Merriam-Webster does.  So does the physical American Heritage.  The Oxford English offers an alternative:  if a "restroom", being a "lavatory", doesn't have a sink, it can instead be the appliance itself, in other words what most Americans would call a "toilet".

The "Portland Loo" certainly includes a toilet.  What the sign at the University branch of the Seattle Public Library was pointing to was "sanican"s.  Would the Oxford English Dictionary really countenance this meaning?

Well, "restroom" isn't the only word I looked up.  I also checked all five for "lavatory", "toilet", and "bathroom", and the three online ones for "comfort station".  Let's look at "toilet":

1. Definition 2a:
   
   bathroom
   
   Definition 2b:
   
   a fixture for defecation and urination that consists essentially of a water-flushed bowl and seat
   
2. Definition 2:
   
   bathroom
   
   Definition 3:
   
   a fixture for use in urinating and defecating; esp : one consisting essentially of a water-flushed bowl and seat
   
3. Definition 9a:
   
   A room, building, or cubicle fitted for people to urinate and defecate in, usually with facilities for hand washing
   
   Definition 9b:
   
   A fixed receptacle into which a person can urinate or defecate, typically consisting of a large bowl (with a ring-shaped liftable seat and usually a lid) connected by plumbing to a system for flushing away the waste into the sewer; a lavatory, a water closet; (also) a similar appliance where the waste is disposed of in the earth or treated with chemicals.
   
4. 1a. A disposal apparatus for defecation and urination.  b. A room or booth containing such an apparatus.
5. 1. A fixture for defecation and urination, consisting of a bowl fitted with a hinged seat and connected to a waste pipe and a flushing apparatus; a privy. 2. A room or booth containing such a fixture. 3. The act or process of dressing or grooming oneself. 4. Dress; attire; costume. 5. The cleansing of a body area as part of a surgical or medical procedure. 6. Archaic A dressing table. ety. French toilette, clothes bag, from Old French tellette, diminutive of teile, cloth
   

So the online AHD demands a flush toilet.  Both Merriam-Websters and the OED say that's the norm.  Only the physical AHD doesn't care.

I'll put the text document into which I copied all the definitions mentioned into the public Google Drive folder I maintain for park photos:

<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cfrNdJI9NVY3ux7OoGI7B8Vg3Klq3liT?usp=sharing> 

I'll also put there the dictionary definitions I photographed at Broadview.  (I did want to go to both branches, so I picked Lake City for a book Broadview also owns, the M-W.  But Broadview's copy of AHD is hidden, so I had to go back there later, which is what I was doing before I found the running street water fountain at 85th & Greenwood.)

As my placing this stuff into the parks folder, and not the smaller libraries folder, implies, while I'm disappointed in the librarians, they aren't my main target here.  Nowhere is the attempted re-definition of "restroom" to exclude sinks more prominent, in Seattle, than in the city's materials targeted at the homeless.

In the first part of "How to Lie to the Homeless", I noted lies the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation was telling by submitting data to a map that's still online, a map meant to show restrooms available to the homeless during the pandemic.  I also noted that these lies weren't too surprising given the longstanding hostility between parks personnel and the homeless.  Not long before that, Rachel Schulkin, a communications manager for that department, told me that all the Department of Human Services did was host those data.  I'm pretty sure, though, that DHS also designed the map and wrote the legend text accompanying it.  And my main purpose here, to which all this has simply been prologue, is to explain the lies DHS's division for the homeless told last winter, and is continuing to try to tell, to the population they supposedly exist to serve.

Next page, dear Diary, coming as soon as I can write it.

A Hike across the Pinehurst Plateau

Dear Diary,

From downtown Lake City I headed south along Lake City Way NE.  My first destination was a Natural Area on that road that, like Flicker Haven, gets ignored by mappers.  Like most Natural Areas in North Seattle, it's in a lowland, but as I learnt while working on the page about the South Fork of Thornton Creek, a page of "Land and Water" I haven't actually written in you yet, the land goes uphill from it not because of a hill, but because of an eastward salient, between the North and South Forks of Thornton Creek, of the plateau that dominates north-central Seattle.  This eastern mini-plateau is essentially what's under the Pinehurst neighbourhood, so, since I don't know it to have its own name, the choice is pretty obvious.

Oh, and although I got all that from a topographical map, in fact that walk Monday evening did entail going uphill, walking on the flat a long way, and then going downhill.  Score one for cartographers!

This is the least compact hike I've taken in this region, which is why the plateau is the only unifying thing I can think of.  Hubbard Homestead is relatively far from the other Northgate parks, Homewood Natural Area from the other Lake City ones, and the Pinehurst parks aren't all that close to anything.  This was, in other words, a real hike.

I took seventeen photos as I walked from that Natural Area to Hubbard Homestead north of Northgate, and Blogspot has apparently let me, this time, put them all in one page.

Map:

Homewood Natural Area

As I said, this one is ignored by the usual mappers - both Google Maps and Open Street Map just leave it blank (Open Street Map, which usually indicates woods, doesn't even do that there).  The Thornton Creek watershed map (PDF) includes it, though, and there's a Seattle city government page documenting a 2017 sweep (PDF), with lots of photos and a map.  Anyway, it's along the western side of Lake City Way about halfway down the block between NE 117th and 120th Streets.  It has one trail, which goes more or less straight down to the creek.

I haven't entirely ignored it, however; this is the only Natural Area in this region that I'd actually shown you pictures of already, dear Diary, in "Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us!" last November, a picture of its sign and a picture of the North Fork there.  So this time I confined myself to one more photo of the creek:

and took a few random landscape shots:

Since this is the last we'll see of the North Fork in this region's hikes, dear Diary, I feel obligated to note that I still haven't figured out one parks department property listed in the 2020 real property report:  "Thornton Creek - North Branch - Part Esmt", property #416, 6 1/4 acres, supposed address Lake City Way NE.  Now, the thing is, the South Fork does run along LCW for a while, but the North Fork just crosses the street, where Homewood Natural Area is.  I don't know whether this means the city owns 6 1/4 acres specifically of the creek bed from Licorice Fern Natural Area to Homewood, which would explain why so much of that creek is daylit, or what exactly, and none of the maps I use shows this ostensible park.

Pinehurst Pocket Park

My first visit to this park was near or at night, and I was much impressed, but you, dear Diary, weren't to know it; in "Top of the City", part I I just called it "very pleasant" and moved on right away, never to mention it again for months.  So I imagine you were pretty surprised when in "What's in a Name?" I called it out as a quarter-acre or less park that I would've regretted not seeing.  I was kind of surprised too.  So I wasn't sure what to expect on returning.

Well, it isn't the perfect park, and the art I mentioned isn't great art.  But it is an interesting place to rest a bit, with interesting things to look at, which is all I needed that evening, and all I would imagine any of your readers would need to justify a visit.  It's certainly the boutique park of this general area.

I remembered art in a kiosk, which this page attests wasn't a bogus memory, but didn't find the kiosk this time.  What I did see is a sort of inlay in the pavement, sadly dirty after days without rain, but even so more effective than this photo can be:

For a much better photo, see this page, which credits an artist named Sara Mall Johani.  Apparently the inlays are actually meant to enable kids' games.

Also largely for the kids, and apparently also by Johani, a rather exotic model tractor, which the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation page says is in memory of a man who used to drive a steam tractor around the neighbourhood as recently as the 1960s:

The pages I read also credit Johani with pillars I haven't yet noticed.

The park's actual focus, according to the signage on the spot, is not artistic but environmental, so for people uninterested in art, there's that, and here's a landscape in which such people may be able to spot features that didn't interest me:

I was also amused by this:

So all in all, it was a satisfying, if not earth-shaking, reunion.

Pinehurst Playground

This is the only park in this page with public-facing plumbing - a water fountain, which I've found running on every visit so far, including Monday's:

It also has a sanican:

which the city's map of hygiene services persists in falsely claiming is ADA-compliant, although I told the map's makers otherwise months ago:

I've shown you, dear Diary, non-plumbing photos of this park before, well anyway one or two, so this time I photographed the playground:

a grill in front of the baseball field:

and a miscellaneous landscape:

As usual when I've visited, the basketball half-court was too busy to photograph.  I'm starting to think half-courts are probably more common in North Seattle parks than either full courts, or the hoops alone that I thought the norm.

Pinehurst P-Patch

This P-Patch is on the more or less flat, thankfully:

but has somewhat confused signage:

Northgate Pump Station

This Seattle Public Utilities facility is a working one, is not one of their parks, and there's no public access inside the building, but they did put a sign out front, and also parkified the premises quite a bit, so I took one picture:

Note, though, Seattle City Light is, despite its do-gooding, much less of a public-facing landowner, and I would not photograph - have on my last hike not photographed - a Seattle City Light building closed to the public but with similarly parklike landscaping.

Hubbard Homestead

Way back in January, in "Hike 1A", part II, I promised this park, for services abundantly rendered, a full treatment.  But I reached it after sunset, which was hardly the ideal time to try to grok a park.  So I only took one photo as testimony that I hadn't forgotten the promise:

and in fact came back Wednesday.  So assuming I return OK from the errands I have planned for the next few hours, I hope to keep that promise tonight, as the second page I write in you about the Wednesday hikes, dear Diary.  Until then!

A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part II

Dear Diary,

It's quiet time now where I live.  I wonder if there's quiet time where the people who were living in Albert Davis Park are now.  Anyway, I should get this done quickly.

Map:

 

Lake City Community Center

The no longer entirely closed doors:

Where the "sanican"s, hand-washing station, and SPU sink were:

Lake City Neighborhood Service Center

The doors:

Their closure:

The Seattle Public Library, Lake City branch

Two tries at a postcard shot:

A detail from the first:  the no-longer entirely closed doors:

Nobody's going to convince me these re-openings are completely unconnected with the recent sweep.  This is a much better approach to sweeps, if someone insists on doing them, than slashing tents and making arrests.

Lake City Civic Core Plaza and Garage

I always thought the paved area with wooden benches was part of the park, which is why I took this shot from outside it:

As for the garage?  It's hard to take a postcard shot of an underground garage.

Oddly, it's more closed than the buildings are:

Fire Station No. 39

A feeble try at a postcard shot:

More not entirely closed doors:

Lake City Mini Park

As with Albert Davis Park, dear Diary, I've only shown you photos of the "sanican"s here before today.  Unlike Albert Davis Park, I'm continuing that practise with regard to this park.

And I think that's all for tonight, dear Diary.  Tomorrow morning, my hike across Pinehurst plateau.