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.

Hike 11B: Near Northeast, part I

Dear Diary,

Oops, I made a mistake yesterday.  Hike 11 was on January 22; January 21 was hike 10, in Green Land and Woodlake Parks.  (Or someplace like that.)  I've already corrected the dates in "Hike 11A", which I wrote in you yesterday, but hope by emphasising the mistake here to alert people who'd read that before the corrections.

Anyway, then, on January 22, I woke up early in Bergen Place in downtown Ballard, ran the two errands that had dragged me there through darkest jungles that damaged my cart, and then headed back to the U-District and "home", such as I then had.

It turns out I took so many photos there that I'll have to split this into two pages.  But let's get started with the first one, which conveniently enough covers everything I can imagine is really part of the U-District.  The next page will cover Ravenna and points east.

The Urban Rest Stop, University District branch

Unlike the Ballard branch, this is one I've used often.  During the 2018-2019 school year, abbreviated as it was, I went there most weeks to shower, leaving my stuff in relative safety in the obscure part of Suzzallo Library I then spent most days in.  (Once per month I went to my storage, got clean clothes out, and showered and changed at the downtown branch.)

At first this branch had several advantages.  Not only was it close to the University, but it had larger shower rooms than the downtown branch, so it was easier to deal with whenever I did have to bring my cart along.  And it was relatively quiet, meaning that most of the time one could take one's time showering.  However, during the aforementioned school year, this laxity apparently offended the Urban Rest Stop Powers That Be, and after a change of personnel, rules changed considerably, and kept changing, so things were much less predictable.

I already told you, dear Diary, on June 8, in "A Shower at Green Lake", about the last time I went there, which was on May 13.  Of course by then I was living outside about 23 hours per day, and had nowhere safe to leave my cart; I was astonished, as I wrestled it up the steps, to be told not only that I couldn't bring it in but also couldn't have brought my backpack in either, if I'd still owned one.  So unfortunately, my last memory of the U-District branch of the Urban Rest Stop at that location is an unhappy one.

Because, you see, dear Diary - oh, let's get the postcard shot out of the way first:

No, not much of a postcard shot, but that was the only outside entrance, and yes, the door was always plastered with notices like that.  But let's take a closer look at one of those notices:

Now this is just weird.  No, not that it had closed.  That was actually predictable, because the church building it was in is slated for demolition.  I remember news stories about the Roots shelter, which also used the showers, relocating.

What's weird is that that Urban Rest Stop location was funded by the Seattle Department of Human Services.  Yes, the same people who made the map these eleven hikes in January were meant to check.  But the map still showed it being open on January 22, at the same address, and still shows it open to this day:

 

Why can't Human Services keep track of their own contractors?  Maybe because their contractors can't keep track of themselves, either.  As of today, the Urban Rest Stop's own website continues to claim this branch not only is open, but is open at that same location.  But on March 11, while the closure notice was gone, the closure remained:

I'll go back there soon.  If I come back with a picture of demolition rubble, will people stop pretending the Urban Rest Stop is still offering restrooms amid that rubble to homeless people in the U-District?  Of course the branch should relocate, not fold, but it should do so and then publish its new address, not send people with urgent needs on wild goose chases.

University Playground

Yes, dear Diary, I tried to cover this one in hike 1A, "Inconvenients", about which I wrote in you way back on January 3.  But I couldn't get all the photos this series of pages is supposed to include for every restroom building.  So I stuck it back into the queue.  The postcard shot:

The closed doors:

The "sanican":

At first, I assumed the map I was checking was intended to truthfully show what hygiene resources were available to homeless people, and I figured the fact that the map showed only a "sanican" here, and didn't make hay out of closed restrooms, was only to be expected.  But by this time, January 22, I had a list of restrooms that were supposed to close for lack of heat (the list I posted part of April 8 in "Park Restrooms in North Seattle") - and University Playground's weren't on that list, even though they obviously don't have room for a furnace.  Now, I think the fact that the city didn't lie over the winter about this restroom building, the way they lied about so many others where a "sanican" was available, simply means that in the view of the Department of Parks and Recreation, this restroom building doesn't really exist, isn't expected ever to re-open.  Which is pretty upsetting.

The Seattle Public Library, University branch

I wasn't done with surprises for the day, although this one, I could've avoided by checking the map, which truthfully represented this particular situation.

I'd covered this in "Hike 1A" too, but made myself go look again, and there'd been a change:

 

I was particularly perplexed by the claim that restrooms were available at University Heights, since I knew that wasn't true, so I went there next.

University Heights Plaza and the nearby building

What the sign was referring to, of course, was these:

This was actually my first chance at two kinds of sinks that had become available during the pandemic, the SPU sink pictured, and one of the original Seattle Street Sinks.  The SPU sink was quite convincing:

Unlike the one I'd found in Lake City, it was working.  I observed that it didn't allow the user to control either the temperature, the strength, or the duration of the water flow.  I also observed that the sink bowls were too small to fill a water bottle at, and I shudder to contemplate trying to wash dishes in them.

The Seattle Street Sink appeared abandoned, although it sounds like it's supposed to be in this kind of environment:

I'm pretty sure it wasn't working, but I could see that it also wouldn't allow its user much control over the water flow.  However, it provided ample room for bottle filling and dish washing.  Of course, that isn't what the city wants homeless people to be able to do, because that would promote the health of homeless people, and we can't have that, can we?

But had anything changed at U-Heights?  Last I'd found, they claimed, like every other building on University Way NE, to have "No Public Restrooms".  How could librarians have gotten something so straightforward wrong?  Anyway, I took a postcard shot:

And then waited a good while for a porch to empty of children and the people taking care of them, so I could look at the signage, and here it is, same as before:

Of course, what we're actually seeing here is two different definitions of "restroom".  I think a restroom is a single room containing at least a toilet and a sink, and it looks like whoever wrote the sign just above agrees with me.  Whoever wrote the library sign seems to have a much wider definition of "restroom".  I will return to this topic later, dear Diary.

Cowen Park

I'm not fond of this gravel- and stairs-infested park even now that I no longer push a cart, but it was one of the core parks I told you about first, dear Diary, in "Our Main Characters" last April 25, "The Curious Incident of the Light in the Night-Time" May 2, "Go North, Aging Man!" and "Foolish Mortal" both May 6, "Ravennawards" May 12, "Home Dry Home" June 4, "A Thief" July 9, "COWEN PARK'S RESTROOMS ARE OPEN" July 30, "My Book of Hours" part III August 30, and, um, "Some Odds and Ends" April 4.  Wow, I neglected it for a while, didn't I?  Well, here are six more photos.

Two opinions as to the best face of the restroom building:  the chalk area:

or the roof with a view:

The closed doors, just as the map then said:

A close-up of that poster, which is actually complimenting the parks department:

And this park's surprise.  (The next page is going to be so boring in comparison...)

Of course, now that the map has caught up to the "sanican" being there (it was moved from Ravenna Park, as I confirmed not much later that day), it claims the restrooms are open too.  On the other hand, it's warm enough now that they should be open, so that may not be a lie.  Yep, more reason for me to go back to my old neighbourhood soon.

But first I should finish telling you about January, dear Diary.  I hope to write two more pages today.  Until then.