Gilman Playground and Woodland and Green Lake Parks Tonight

Dear Diary,

From downtown this evening I went to Fred Meyer in Ballard, the only other errand I'd left myself time to run today before tomorrow's hiking.  I'd mis-remembered an article in Publicola as implying that both the RVs adjacent to Green Lake Park, and the campers in Woodland Park, were to be swept soon.  This is not true; the article in fact specifically says the campers have until January.  But anyway, 

Oh, dear, dear Diary.  I've even told the city (in the form of the Seattle Public Library) my adress, but haven't told you.  I live on NE 64th St between Ravenna Boulevard and Green Lake Park.  So I figured I could walk home from Ballard, and look into Woodland Park on the way.  And from there, Gilman wasn't much of a stretch.

Gilman Playground

The restrooms, of course, remain closed - no park restrooms in southern Ballard stay open in winter.  (Ross Park's restrooms have to close in cold weather.  Gilman Playground's don't have to, but ought to close, so homeless people lose an alternative, because human Number Two is such an excellent decoration for Ballard's streets.  And Ballard Playground's restrooms don't at all have to close, they're in a much bigger building for crying out loud, but there's no way the people who live near there want their neighbourhood to have the only open park restrooms in Ballard.)

Anyway, the real news is that the water fountain, which had consistently run ever since my first visit in June 2020, even that winter, was off.

Well, I guess it deserved a rest after all that time, but I was a little shocked and more than a little disappointed to find that.  I didn't take any photos there.

Woodland Park

This was a pretty focused visit; I visited the three restroom buildings in the western, upper, part of "Lower" Woodland Park, and some of the water fountains in that area.

I found the men's room of the "50th St" restrooms open at 7:40 P.M., the women's room closed, according to the sign due to a "malfunction or freeze".  The nearby water fountain, though considerably repaired before the last time I'd seen it, wasn't running then, so I wasn't in the least surprised that it wasn't running tonight, as nightly lows head towards the point when most water fountains really need to be shut down.  (Hing Hay Park's water fountain has been shut off for nearly a week, although the one in "lower" Ravenna Park was still running Friday night.)

So, um, I was pretty unprepared for this:

That's one of the two fountains attached to the "Pink Palace" building in the centre-west of "Lower" Woodland Park.  As with most of the fountains I've found running lately (Magnuson, Ravenna, Bitter Lake, not so much downtown), its drain is blocked with sand, but it's exuberantly running.  Now, I've argued, as long ago as November 2020, that water fountains attached to heated restroom buildings are, based on Jackson Park's experience, good choices to keep on in winter.  I haven't noticed Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation paying much attention to that argument, though, and based on what I found tonight in Gilman, here, and at Green Lake, I strongly suspect the fountains still running at this point are simply those near remaining homeless encampments in or near the parks.  (Ravenna is a counter-argument, but its fountains' harder water may give them a bit more leeway with cold.)

The rest of the social contract that seems to me to have existed between the campers and the parks staff at Woodland Park has survived, so far, to varying degrees.   I checked all the shelters, something I've previously had trouble doing at night, but tonight a full moon helped, and so did Christmas lights at three of the shelters, including two in the southern area where I hadn't previously seen good evidence of electricity at all.  All remain occupied except for shelter 7, where I'm profoundly disappointed to have to report that only one bench remains; all the other benches and tables are gone, presumably for use as firewood.  I found not only electrical cables, but also water hoses, running across a street in the north of the park from shelter 6.

Where the social contract has most obviously broken down, besides the stolen furniture, is in trash handling.  Lots of bags haven't been picked up.  Possibly in reaction to that, lots of trash is now there unbagged, including at the presumably former pick-up stop adjacent to that water fountain whose photo I showed you, dear Diary, pages and pages ago.  There are two water fountains there, adjacent, but the one on the right, nearer in this photo, though also running, has a small bag in its bowl.

But actually, the program that supplies trash removal to encampments includes supplying bags, so I'm guessing both removal and bags are no longer available.  One of the best things mayor Jenny Durkan ever did for homeless people was to ramp that program way, way up early in the lockdown, and then the City Council doubled her request for its 2021 budget.  So maybe this is just a blip, depleted funds, and come New Year's Day garbage removal at Woodland Park will resume, and the campers will have a lot of tidying to do.  Or maybe, since their sweep is planned for January, nobody will bother.  Dunno.

Anyway, I also found the fountain running at shelter 6, which had not been running the last time I visited, in, um, October.  So what the heck is going on here?  My guess is that parks staff are continuing to bend over backwards to be nice to the Woodland Park campers, even with them the most likely suspects in the denudation of shelter 7, and the trash problem is just the blip I speculate about above.  Maybe the parks people are aware that the tiny house village spots that had been planned for the campers have gone elsewhere, so the campers probably face a pretty bleak future after January, the past eighteen or so months probably the best of the homeless parts of their lives, and parks employees are being models of forbearance in the meantime.  But anyway, after I tell you, dear Diary, that I found the "Pink Palace" men's room open but the women's, and both "lawn bowling" ones, closed, and that all the door shots are at the Google Drive folder, that's it for Woodland Park.

Except that I still hadn't found a single sweep notice.  I've recently seen a sweep near where I work, and although nobody played entirely fair there, still, there was a notice, and it wasn't hard to find.  So why not at Woodland?  Because I got the date wrong, of course, but the point is, then I went on to Green Lake Park to look for the notice there (as well as because it was on my way home, of course).

Green Lake Park

Of course, what that Publicola article actually said was that only those camping along West Green Lake Way N are to be swept.  And they did get a notice, but it took a strange form.

For me, this is fitting.  My mother was widowed when I was 8, and I went through high school young, from 11 to 15.  So she refused to let me take driver's ed, because it would send her auto insurance rates skyrocketing, and I'd never been able to afford it, time and money at the same time, since.  As a result, I'm one of the few Americans for whom "gas" and "parking" don't have similar visceral resonance to, say, "electricity" and "phone".  I can intellectually understand when people say the vehicular homeless have huge extra worries, specifically gas and parking, but it just basically doesn't make sense to me.  So of course, given that I don't understand them, I'd expect their sweeps to take a different form.  And that they do:

Ho ho ho!  Happy Christmas!

That notice includes a URL which the Seattle Department of Transportation, which posted it, says explains about "temporary no parking zones".  This it does.  Temporary no parking zones are things private companies and individuals normally pay SDOT for permission to impose, and that's all well explained, and indeed mapped, at that site.  But zones imposed by SDOT itself for sweeping purposes?  The site certainly does not enable one to find those (not even through the map's GIS features).  The particular temporary no parking zone of interest here isn't even on the map yet:

SDOT seems determined to play the Grinch this year.

Mind, the Publicola report also refers to tents in Green Lake Park near all those vehicles, and I did see some tonight, and even exchange greetings with a resident.  So does "No Parking" cover them, too?  Or where is their sweep notice?

I certainly didn't find it at the Green Lake Small Craft Center, where the restrooms were open (well, it wasn't 9 P.M. yet).  The restrooms were also open at the "65th St" location, as they should be.  The latter has no water fountains, but those at the Small Craft Center were running.  These, too, are attached to buildings that are presumably heated all winter, so again, they fit my advocacy.  Problem is, the Woodland Park shelter 6 water fountain is free-standing, and if that shelter were heated, well, shelter 7 would still have its furniture.  So I think the water fountains still running in Woodland and Green Lake Parks are still running, not because, in a normal Seattle winter, they can safely run most of the time (as Gilman Playground's free-standing fountain showed last winter, when there were homeless in that place), but just only because the parks department is trying to be nice to the campers.

Which is certainly a happier thing to close on than what SDOT is preparing to do to the campers' more mobile peers.

Good night, dear Diary.  Tomorrow, I hope to hike the parks of northeastern downtown, and finish that series at last, except for the artist credits.

A Roguish Pair of Eyes

Dear Diary,

Hoo boy, almost done.  I'll have to take less ambitious hikes going forward; this has taken almost as long to write about as it took to walk.  This final page for the night concerns Woodland Park, but is not intended as my full treatment for spring or for the next year as the three previous pages are for the smaller parks to the south.

It was after 7 P.M., the notional closing time of most Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation restrooms, when I got there, so I confined myself to a few things.  I checked on a few restrooms and water fountains, and took multiple photos of two more or less opposite things that obtruded themselves - the Woodland Park Rose Garden, which I walked through today for the first time, and a pile-up of uncollected trash, again, near the camps in upper Lower Woodland Park.  I suppose I should start with the trash, and end with the Rose Garden, so as to give you, dear Diary, a better chance of sweet dreams.

On that theory, I should start with the restrooms, actually.  As usual, the "50th St" rooms were open, as were the "Pink Palace" ones; the "lawn bowling" ones were not.  I don't know what happened there during the day, one reason I'll have to go back to Woodland Park.  But at 7:44 P.M. I took this photo at the door to the "lawn bowling" men's room:

 Yes, dear Diary, I'm pretty sure that's actual human Number Two there.

Shelter 6 is the core of the camp setup, the main source of electricity, the focal point of the nearby tents.  Last autumn the water fountain adjacent to it was one of only two in this huge park, with more water fountains than any other in North Seattle, that actually provided water.  Not now:

Trash was piled up in three places that I'm guessing are established collection points.  Now, the City Council met and exceeded the mayor's request for more money to collect homeless people's trash, so I'm not clear on why there should still be a problem at Woodland Park, the place where in general the parks staff have treated homeless campers better than anywhere else during the pandemic.  But there is.  The first place is right near that water fountain (its base is at the left of this photo) and shelter 6:

The second is near the transition from pavement to gravel, on the road between the "Pink Palace" restrooms and shelter 6 (and the "lawn bowling" restrooms):

And the third surrounds the water fountains, that have now been dead for at least a year and a half, attached to the "Pink Palace" building:

The Woodland Park Rose Garden

This was closed each time I tried last year (which was only a few times, not nearly as many as my visits to Lower Woodland Park), because it's managed by the same organisation that manages the Woodland Park Zoo next door.  But now it's open 7:30 A.M. to dusk.

It includes something I vaguely remember reading about, something slightly at odds with the more traditional Rose Garden, a "Sensory Garden".  This has elements meant to appeal to each sense.  Of course, right now, the taste, smell, and maybe even touch elements have to be off limits.  But here's the big one for sound:

Their signage gives that a pretentious name and makes the garden's makers sound dumber than they can possibly actually be, but anything that puts windchimes into a park can't be all bad.

The Rose Garden proper is much simpler and easier to enjoy.  Some flowering trees:

A view down its middle:

I walked what seemed to be the main trail, entrance to exit, and found no water fountains nor restrooms.

Back to reality

The only other water fountain that ran last October in Lower Woodland Park was the one attached to the 5427 Building at the middle of the "cloverleaf" (Leo Lassen) baseball fields.  It isn't running now:

I'm lucky I'm housed now, and can indulge my water addiction as much as I like.  Since the lockdowns began, that has been way too difficult for way too many homeless people.  Bottled water companies benefit from this situation, as do people who hate homeless people and want them (us) all to die, but I don't see why normal people without a pecuniary interest would want, for a second year running, to make spurious claims that water fountains are dangerous.  The first time around, there was something resembling a medical justification for the claim, although not for nearly as long as the parks department kept making the claim.  This second time it's just stupid and evil.

Hike 3A: Woodland Park

Dear Diary,

Woodland Park is a large park north of Fremont.  My policy in photographing the large parks whose hours fluctuated much of last year (as well as the smaller Gas Works Park) has been to stay strictly functional, on the grounds that they're photographed enough.  So I introduced Woodland Park June 8 in " A Shower at Green Lake" with photos of its restrooms' doors, and then gave it its own pages as part II of "South of North Once More" (October 8; photos of water fountains) and part IV of "Standing Room Only" (November 24; photos of shelters).  It gets its own page this time too, and lots of photos, but half are of restroom doors again.

I refer to quarters of this park, but only cover half of them.  You'll remember, dear Diary, that the western block of the park is dominated by the Woodland Park Zoo, which is kind of complicated to visit these days (oh, dear, I don't think I mentioned to you that already in October it had partly re-opened).  All the restrooms in that block are paywalled inside the zoo, and the HSD map ignores them, so I have, this time, too.  One of these days I'll have to figure out a way to show you that zoo, dear Diary, and its restrooms and water fountains.

In these hikes I visited Woodland Park's other half many times, but mostly at night, trying to figure out its restrooms' hours.  I'll discuss those visits in later pages.  The only times I'm sure I saw Woodland Park by day are January 9, hike 3A, and January 21, hike 10.  All the photos below were taken in about an hour, 10:48 A.M. to 12:06 P.M. on January 9; I remember photographing one shelter one night, but now can't find the photo.

Between e-mailed exchanges with Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, and the map published by the Department of Human Services ("HSD map") that I checked in these hikes, I now know the names the parks department uses for all of Woodland Park's pairs of restrooms, and figure clarity will be aided if I use them.  So here goes.

The first restroom pair is northeast of the big, fancy baseball diamond, but I actually started my trip by going to the southwest of that diamond; I wanted to find a dry place to set my satchels down, so I could put a coat I'd removed into its proper place on top of my cart, and thought one of the dugouts would do fine.  Unfortunately, although I'd rested there in October, they're now locked:

(But then, that doesn't look too dry anyway, does it?)

The damaged water fountains near home plate looked unchanged.

While I was there, a man came up to me and offered me $20.  I told him I was pretty rich just then and he should give it to someone else.  He insisted, saying I could pass it on, and since I was going up the hill to a huge encampment, I agreed.

The first restroom pair is, as I said, not far from there.  The Citywide Athletic Building

has restrooms whose doors open to the outside; the parks department calls these "Rio".  Unfortunately for anyone who works in that building, those restrooms are, unlike last winter, closed:

Bad vandals!

The parks department has compensated by opening the other pair of restrooms in the park's lowest, easternmost, athletics-focused quarter.  This, you'll remember, dear Diary, is in the middle of four smaller baseball diamonds grouped together.  The parks department name is the obvious one:  "Cloverleaf".

The building with the restrooms is also seating behind home plate for field #6, which is obviously its most attractive side:

The restrooms:

Again with the fine print.  That announces a schedule from dawn to dusk, like Jackson Park.

The map also says these restrooms, unlike any others in Woodland Park, have "sanican"s near them.  I vaguely remember these as being pretty near the restrooms, but at the moment there's a Curative COVID-testing site back toward the parking lot, and so they've been moved there.

Ms. Schulkin complained to me that I'd pointed out (in "Hike 1A:  Inconvenients", part II, January 4) a new "sanican" in Northgate Park; that's there to support another Curative site.  Apparently that one, being temporary, isn't appropriate to notice or something.

Well, that's it for the eastern quarter of the park.  The road uphill branches off from West Green Lake Way toward and then past the tennis courts.  Now, the restrooms in the western part of this block were open 24 hours last summer, and the obvious explanation is the encampment up there.  But the official explanation given me by Ms. Schulkin is that with roads closed to shut off parking lots, there's no need to close the restrooms.  Consistent with this, although parking lots elsewhere have re-opened, these ones and their access roads remain blocked, well enough that it was a hassle for me, each time I visited Woodland Park, to get my cart past the barriers.

On the way uphill one passes one of the visible signs of why so many people have moved here.  Well, actually, three of those signs:

Notice how much thicker the one at the bottom of the second photo is.  There's serious electricity being provided to the campers in upper Lower Woodland Park.

In October I'd noticed that nearly all the campers were in the northern part of this quarter of the park, presumably because the electricity was there.  This time I saw more tents in the southern part, although the vast majority are still north; probably not coincidentally, I thought I saw evidence that the electricity had reached the south.  I'd meant to investigate more carefully, but at this time can't.

I think the electricity is routed through shelters with that amenity, though I'd hope by now it's got a sturdier basis.  My October visits were largely about the shelters, and on these trips in January I paid particular attention to three of them, one for each restroom pair.

So let's start at the top of the hill.  The parks department's name for this restroom building is "Pink Palace".  Unfortunately my phone's camera's trouble with reds makes the reason less than obvious in this photo:

The restrooms are open, as expected considering that both the HSD map and last year's parks department list include the Pink Palace.

The shelter near this one that I wanted to investigate is shelter 7, set deepest in the woods that are this block's most photogenic feature, with no amenities.  I'd found it unused in October.  Well, now someone has pitched a tent whose edge is within about a centimeter of the shelter - outside it, mind you, this person isn't trying to hog the shelter, but I suspect trying to start a new neighbourhood.

Not far from the Pink Palace, up so close to the block's corner that it's actually pretty easy to reach from Aurora Ave N, is a restroom building whose parks department name refers to the sport whose greens are right next to it, "lawn bowling".

Neither the HSD map nor last year's list says these restrooms should be open, and Ms. Schulkin told me by e-mail that the park's manager was worried about it, because of the encampment, and had requested a "sanican".  Well, there's no "sanican" there.  Instead...

It dawned on me that those photos maybe didn't make it obvious that these are open, so I also took a close-up of the men's room:

Yes, they're open.  Establishing their hours was the main reason I kept coming back to Woodland Park, specifically, but they're certainly open daytimes.  UNLESS - I don't have confirmation but it seems obvious - unless it gets really cold, in which case these will be as closed as the map says they are.

The shelter near these that I wanted to investigate is shelter 6, which in October had seemed to be one woman's remarkably homelike domain.  This time it was much less homelike, though still enough so to notice, and I didn't hear a woman's voice from it until one of my last visits.  Instead it was a communal kitchen, like shelters 4 and 5, used mostly by men.  I'd half expected something like that.

I could've sworn I photographed it one night, trying to capture its size, the way the walls have been supplemented with tarps and cloth, the electric light shining through those - none of which my previous photo at considerable distance conveyed - but I suspect my phone's camera didn't successfully take the shot; I certainly can't find it now.

Dear Diary, I should probably tell you more about my impressions of gender and homelessness, but this isn't the place.  Let me just say that while the woman I briefly met may feel hard done by, I have no trouble imagining that the change happened without violence, and that of course most of the people camped nearby would be men.

This area is still behind on trash collection, near as I can tell, but the problem hasn't gotten any worse since October, it just hasn't gotten all the way better.

Anyway, we're almost done.  The third pair of restrooms normally meant for picnickers and hikers, now supporting an encampment, is in the block's southwest, which is still higher than the block's eastern half, but not nearly as high as the Pink Palace area.  One of the three shelters here was certainly being hogged in October, with two tents inside it, another I guessed might be shared, and then there's shelter 1.  When I visited it I thought it was in use, but my notes and photographs indicated nothing to justify that.

Well, it's certainly in use now.

The restrooms for these three shelters, and the apparently increasing number of tents nearby, are called for the access "50th St".

These are supposed to be open per the HSD map, and were supposed to be open last year, so it was no great surprise to find this:

These photos were posed.  Park restroom doors are usually propped open in summer, but in winter, lower temperatures and more violent winds discourage that.  So here I propped the doors open with nearby garbage cans long enough to take these pictures.

Woodland Park is the place in North Seattle where the parks department has most gone out of its way for my peers.  I'm going to tell you much more problematic things in the coming days, dear Diary, but we'll have to remember while discussing them that at Woodland Park the department has shown real kindness.

Before the Ruling at Cal Anderson Park

Dear Diary,

Well, they tell me it's all over, and thankfully no Rachel Corrie today.  So now I can show you the photos I took yesterday.

These fall into three groups.  I'll start with the messages.  When Cal Anderson Park first became a flashpoint, in the days of CHOP and CHAZ, the original Black Lives Matter protestors complained that white activists arriving were diluting the focus to things like saving the whales, say.  Well, probably some of the people there yesterday were some of the people those complaints were about, but this time their focus was strict.  And ...

This time the focus was on my kind.  On me.  These people had not come to the park on behalf of whales, or of the transgendered, or of COVID-19 vaccines for poorer countries, worthy though all of those causes are.  They had taken the risk of coming to the park, and temporarily unhousing themselves, on behalf of me.  How could my heart not sing?

Of course my excuse for being there, if questioned by agents of the city (didn't happen) or by protestors (did), was that I was press.  So my next group of photos is of amenities, the things I've been writing about in you all along, dear Diary.  This took some doing because most of these were within the barricades, but one thing wasn't:

Despite the traumatic events going on, Cal Anderson remained about as messy as a very messy park, rather than the hellhole I'd documented some months ago.  Score one for the kids.

Several photos below depict what I found when I first tried to follow the directions I'd been given for a way through the barricades.  But after taking the photo just above, I decided to make one last try.  And it turned out the entrances were guarded, by strapping young men able to move substantial obstacles, and I just hadn't found a guard.  The one I found at that point apparently decided I was too obviously homeless to be a spy, and shifted a pallet, thus creating a passage this ageing and fattening man barely squeezed through.

The park's older water fountain, of course turned off in mid-December:

The newer, winterised, one:

This was also shut off, but since winterised water fountains in Seattle work by requiring the user to hold the button down for some seconds, no mere photo could depict its being shut off.  So I took a video, which, since I've recently been unable to embed videos, can be watched at YouTube.

I trust I don't have to explain these next shots:

However, I do have to mention that I'm not just ignoring the "sanican"s and hand-washing stations out of my usual snobbery.  I was puzzled by my inability to find them, but it turns out they'd been removed, so determined was the city to make life miserable for people in that place.

To my mind this calls into question the city's claim that it acted only in response to threats against park workers.  Granted those shouldn't happen, but to respond first by removing sanitation, contra CDC guidance, and then removing the campers, ditto - well, that seems much too planned out to have been a knee-jerk response to one incident.

Cal Anderson Park has a category of building I haven't said much to you about, dear Diary, for the sensible reason that they're usually locked, and not just during pandemics.  Ironically, they're called "shelterhouses".  That day, the one at Cal Anderson Park actually was sheltering people, but I trust this photo gets across the essentials.

Presumably once it's repaired it'll go back to being rented out at an astonishingly low $10/hour - see, it's the fees that keep it out of reach for the likes of me.

Finally, we come to the defences.  As I circled these fruitlessly, I began to think that the protestors had read my complaint, in "Cal Anderson Park Is Not a Park", that if the city had really meant to close it they would have fenced it, and had decided to do the job themselves.  My first photo, showing the restrooms and main water fountain as close as I expected to get, actually shows a pre-existing fence, of which there are many in the south.

This next one, though, shows the kids' work:

And as noted above, I took several at what seemed the likeliest entrance.  I can't say I'm happy with what they show.

Oddly, from a distance, the barricades became much less noticeable:

And now they're gone.  Good day, dear Diary.