Showing posts with label waterways. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waterways. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

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:

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

The region headed 32

The region headed 49

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.

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.

"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.)

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.

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:

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.


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Saturday, May 1, 2021

While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part II

Dear Diary,

This is the second of, I hope, four pages about my hike today.  This one covers two parks on Wallingford's Lake Union coast, plus one waterway (a state-owned property explained in detail October 8 in "Lake Union's North Shore").  This hike was primarily about:  1) whether restrooms were open or closed; 2) whether water fountains were running or not running; 3) taking lots of photos; 4) in particular, looking for any hint that water fountains or restrooms had been added to any park I hadn't visited since last spring, and taking photos meant to document that they hadn't.

EDIT 5/11 Map:


Gas Works Park

My January visit to this park is described in "Hike 8A" from March 21, which also gives reference to previous pages relevant to this smallest of North Seattle's famous parks.  In general, I've avoided taking any but purely functional photos of this and the other famous parks, so I started by taking some clearly non-functional ones today:

Much of Gas Works Park's land area actually consists of rolling, grassy hills pretty much like this.  The things it's famous for are concentrated in the park's eastern half:



That said, I also took functional photos.  This park was publicly announced last year as offering 24 hour restroom availability.  By my standards it's deficient in privacy and service - soap and drying capacity, in particular - compared to most of the other 24-hour park restrooms in North Seattle, so I've basically taken for granted that the city followed through on this announcement, because it would be far too easy to embarrass them if they hadn't, and avoided visiting it personally at night.  But anyway, today the restrooms were open, as expected:



And the men's room lacked privacy, soap, and a dryer, as expected.

Also as expected, the water fountain isn't running.  It wasn't last October, either.  Note, please:  The many water fountains across North Seattle in this situation haven't provided water at least since November 2019.  A year and a half ago now.  Is it any wonder many have been vandalised?


Waterway 19

As mentioned above, the state Department of Natural Resources controls the Lake Union waterways, of which at least ten, and probably at most eleven, are on the northern shores.  It licenses various entities to occupy them.  Waterway 19 is the only one the Seattle parks department has licensed and operates as a more or less regular Seattle park in its own right.  (Others have been incorporated into the Burke-Gilman Trail, and part of waterway 14 is incorporated into Northlake Park.)  Waterway 19 would be called a "Natural Area" except that in North Seattle only politically well-connected creek valleys get that name, so it just retains its previous name, but what it fundamentally is, is a Natural Area on Lake Union's shore.  Examples:



It's adjacent to Gas Works Park, to the east, and I've mentioned it to you, dear Diary, June 9 in "At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?" and October 8 in "Lake Union's North Shore", but the only previous photos I've shown you were in "Past Work and Gas Works" June 21.

Waterway 21

This is a small, pleasant viewpoint with benches not far from Stone Way N.  It had started raining - not mist or drizzle, but actual raindrops, though rather infrequent - while I was in Gas Works Park, and I needed to plan the rest of my trip in a less crowded place.  So even though it's not a bona fide Seattle parks department park, my focus on these trips, I figured it deserved a photo.

You already have several more photos of this one in "Lake Union's North Shore", dear Diary.  I have no idea who licensed it and put all that nice stuff there, frustrating though that all must be for boaters who want to use it the way waterways were used in the 19th century, as boat access to and from the water.

Well, this is a gracelessly short and rather incoherent page, but I was worried about adding these photos to the crowd on the previous page.  Next, on to Fremont.



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Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Water and Water: The Lake Washington Ship Canal

Dear Diary,

I'd started to feel guilty about greeting possible new readers of you with first the street ends series, whose geographical subtitles named bodies of water whose names I hadn't been clear on until, um, planning that series, in October.  And then the geographic series organised by watershed.  Anyone who reads more than a few of your pages, dear Diary, is likely to know the name "Thornton Creek" and maybe even realise that it's in the north of northeast Seattle.  But a few pages after that will come "Yesler Creek" !  Can I be any more obscure?

It's probably a good thing that I couldn't make this page your Christmas present, dear Diary, as I'd originally intended.  An apology shouldn't also be used as a gift.  But anyway this page is my apology to anyone who found the street ends subtitles obscure but for some reason sees this anyway.  People more nautically informed than I - which is pretty much anyone who knows anything on the topic - may find nothing new here.

Or maybe there will be something new, because I had to get a not very famous recent book to write this.  So nautically informed people may wish to read and/or buy Waterway:  The Story of Seattle's Locks and Ship Canal by David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and the staff of HistoryLink, Seattle:  HistoryLink and Documentary Media (but distributed by the University of Washington Press), copyright 2017, ISBN 978-1-933245-43-0.  The Seattle Public Library has several copies.

For each body of water I list bridges with ends in North Seattle, often referring to additional relevant or helpful pages but primarily based on pages 99-100 of Waterway.  I also list parks at the shore.  This page's whole point being to elucidate the street ends series of December 20-21, I don't provide detailed references to those pages but do name street ends I think worth mentioning or necessary to mention.  Same with Lake Union's waterways.

Dear Diary, at one level you've been an exercise in geography all along, certainly not history like Waterway.  Something else I've done lately is really rub in my focus on the eastern half of North Seattle, starting both those obscure series in Lake City.  So let's, just once, start elsewhere.

Shilshole Bay

So the premise here is that I'm trying to explain things, to worry less about being condescending.  So four of the places under discussion are "bays" and it occurred to me that since I didn't know the term's formal definition, I shouldn't assume, dear Diary, that your readers know any definition.

So according to Wikipedia, there is an official definition, but it requires hydrological knowledge few people have, so I'll just have to settle for mine, which is that a bay is any body of water that looks, on a map, like it's partly separated from some larger body of water, by land.  Now, by this standard, Shilshole Bay, supposedly enclosed from Puget Sound by Magnolia and, um, Golden Gardens Park, is not much of a bay in my book.  Be that as it may, everyone calls the saltwater side of the canal Shilshole Bay, so I will too.  Shilshole Bay is the water west of Loyal Heights, and of Ballard north of about NW Market and 55th Streets; its bit of the canal is the water south of Ballard west of 32nd Ave NW.

The Lake Washington Ship Canal consists of four bays plus two lakes, that have existed for thousands of years since glacier time, a ditch first dug out of an older river channel in the 1880s, and a ditch first dug in the 20th century to replace a nearby one dug in the 1880s.  The new thing, the thing that means the canal opened in 1917, was the Ballard Locks.

Shilshole Bay changed less than most of these bodies of water.  Notably, it both started and stayed salt water, and its relationship with sea level stayed the same.  But the Locks, specifically, in 1916 before they opened to traffic, did one thing to Shilshole Bay:  they cut it off from its own bay, Salmon Bay.

North Seattle's parks on Shilshole Bay - Golden Gardens Park, the Eddie Vine Boat Ramp, the NW 60th St Viewpoint - and its street ends - are introduced in "The Ballard Seacoast", part I, June 30, with more photos of the street ends (34th and 36th Avenues NW, NW 57th and 60th Streets) in the street ends post.

The only bridge that crosses Shilshole Bay does so only technically, being quite close to the Locks.  This is Bridge #4, a railroad bridge owned by Burlington Northern but still called by an older corporate name, the Great Northern Bridge, opened in 1914.

The Narrows (?)

This is the strait that made Salmon Bay a bay even before the Locks were built there.  Not that much of Salmon Bay is all that much wider; it's the next best thing to a fjord, that bay.  But anyway, the Locks were built there; I'm not sure to what extent they can be used, when not closed to visitors, as a bridge.

I'm also not sure the name "the Narrows" is actually used by anyone other than the authors of Waterway.  Google reacts with guileless shock when, asked for information about a Seattle Narrows, information about ones in Tacoma, Bremerton, Utah and various other places won't do.

Nevertheless, the strait exists, and if it isn't called the Narrows, I don't know of another name.

Salmon Bay

Salmon Bay is a long, narrow body of water bounded by the even narrower Narrows and Fremont Cut.  It's the water south of most of Ballard, from 32nd to 3rd Avenues NW; it's also, technically, the water west of southern Ballard, south of NW Market and 55th Streets.  Its widest points, east and especially west of 15th Ave NW, have suspiciously straight edges, suggesting that to at least some extent they're man-made, but the 1897 and 1908 maps I'm using in "Land and Water" show that those were its widest points then too.

Salmon Bay changed probably most drastically, of the bodies of water in the canal.  According to Waterway, it used to be a "brackish" place that varied in depth from inches at low tide to eleven feet at high tide; now they say most of it is thirty feet deep, with little tidal variation, and fresh water.  One of the few things the unreferenced Wikipedia article says is that the water isn't all fresh, but still, this is a ton of change.  Salmon Bay was flooded with fresh water in 1916, before the Locks opened.

In North Seattle, Salmon Bay has plenty of street ends, three pages' worth, but the only ones I recommend are at 11th and 20th Avenues NW; the only official park on Salmon Bay's north coast, the 14th Ave NW Boat Ramp, is identified as a street end too, but was also introduced June 25 in "History and Parks", part I.

Being so narrow, Salmon Bay has been bridged a lot.

  1. A bridge opened in 1889 at 14th Ave NW, and torn down in 1910 in preparation for #3.
  2. A railroad bridge opened in 1890 just west of #1, torn down in 1910.
  3. The 14th Ave NW Bridge, opened in 1910, raised in 1916, torn down in 1918.
  4. The Northern Pacific railroad bridge, opened in 1914, torn down in 1976.  Ballard terminus at the equivalent of 8th Ave NW.
  5. The Ballard Bridge, opened in 1917.

Sources, besides Waterway, both by Priscilla Long and both published 2017:  "Ballard Bridge (Seattle)" and "Fourteenth Avenue NW Bridge / Salmon Bay Drawbridge (Seattle)".

The Fremont Cut

The Fremont Cut is the western of the two man-made parts of the Canal; I understand it as running roughly northwest from the equivalent of Fremont Lane N to that of 3rd Ave NW.  It is the water south of the relevant parts of Ballard and Fremont, and west of southwestern Fremont, between, say, N 36th St, Aurora Ave N, and the water.  It has much more history than the eastern man-made part, but historians have written much less about that history; the Fremont Cut is the main reason I needed Waterway.

It originated as a creek's valley.  The Outlet, later called Ross Creek, was how Lake Union drained into Salmon Bay before canal-building began there.  In 1885, a canal opened in that valley.  Waterway says another canal opened in 1902.  Valley, creek and both canals were then drowned by the much bigger canal of today, completed in 1916.

Because essentially all the Cut's width is reserved for navigation, which bars piers, boaters don't show it much love, and its only North Seattle street end is the uninteresting one under the Fremont Bridge, with opportunities for more passed up at Phinney Ave N and 2nd Ave NW, at least.  But the Fremont Cut is, of course, the Canal of Fremont Canal Park, which must make up for a lot.

Being narrow, it's been bridged plenty:

  1. Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad Bridge, opened in 1888, shown on a 1912 map but presumably torn down soon after.  Its Fremont terminus was south of N 34th St, probably near the Burke-Gilman Trail.
  2. The first Fremont Bridge was primarily for streetcars, opened in 1892, torn down in 1911.
  3. A Ross Bridge or Ross Wagon Bridge is attested in 1903 and 1912, according to Waterway; nobody seems to mention it online.  Its northern terminus seems to have been near 2nd Ave NW.
  4. A temporary Fremont Bridge opened in 1912, but was torn down in 1915.
  5. The present Fremont Bridge opened in 1917.
Sources, besides Waterway:  "Fremont Bridge (Seattle)" by Glenn Drosendahl, 2017, and too many others to list here.

I hadn't realised, dear Diary, how much of a unit the Burke-Gilman Trail actually is.  The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad Company was founded by twelve Seattle investors (including Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman) who were tired of Seattle being bypassed by the major railroad companies.  They made ambitious plans, many of which they failed to carry out; but they carried out enough to achieve their purpose, because when the company went bankrupt its lines were bought, not piecemeal by farmers, but by one of those major railroad companies.  The SLSE went everywhere the Burke-Gilman Trail now goes, and I'd bet the whole trail is on former SLSE land, but I haven't yet found convincing evidence that this is true west of Fremont.  Sources:  various respectable ones like Wikipedia (which does assign the Ballard BGT to SLSE), the Seattle Department of Transportation, and HistoryLink, but actually most usefully "Wedgwood's Trailmakers: the Burke-Gilman Trail" by Valarie, 2013.

Lake Union

Lake Union is the lake shaped rather like a human uterus, more or less at the centre of Seattle.  It was named before the Civil War, by the canal's first promoter, who hoped it would be the means of union between the fresh water and the salt.  As I'm defining it here, its North Seattle coast runs from the equivalent of Fremont Lane N to I-5, which is there the equivalent of 6th Ave NE.  It's the water south of all of Wallingford, the eastern half of Fremont, and arguably a bit of the University District; thanks to the peninsula on which Gas Works Park sits, it's east of many parts of those neighbourhoods, west of some, and both east and west of a few.  It's easily the largest body of water along the course of the canal, though much smaller than Shilshole Bay and Lake Washington at either end.

Waterway doesn't say much about the canal's ecological effects on Lake Union, but they must have been considerable.  Before the canal, it was essentially a sleepy lake fed by a small hinterland, drained by one little creek and the occasional flood.  Now it's rather shallower and smaller, it's fed by the entire Lake Washington watershed, it's drained by the Fremont Cut, and it never, ever floods.  It's turned from a parking lot for water into a highway for it.  Seems to me that's a pretty dramatic change.

"Lake Union's North Shore:  Waterways and Street Ends", October 8, provides references for the two parks - Gas Works Park and Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp - and photos of, plus directions to, the waterways, of which I recommend 15, 17, 18, 21 and 23, and 19 for people who like short hikes.  In "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal" January 1, I noted that several waterways turn out to be missing.  They still are - more on this below - but the system by which they're numbered makes me sure that none of the missing ones could be on Lake Union's north shore.

Bridges over Lake Union cross it at its narrow northwestern and northeastern ends.  I've defined the Fremont Bridge into the Fremont Cut, and the bridges to the east elsewhere as well, but there are two bridges left:

  1. The Stone Way Bridge, opened in 1911, torn down in 1917.  It appears to have bent mid-span.  Although originally intended as a temporary substitute for the Fremont Bridge, it had a lot of support for more permanent status, and its demolition, necessary in canal terms, seems to have left many in eastern Fremont angry.  One generation later, they more or less got revenge:
  2. The George Washington Memorial Bridge, opened in 1932, on Aurora Ave N.

See, besides Waterway, "Looking back: Stone Way Bridge, Once the Route to North Seattle" by Peg Nielsen, 2013, and "Seattle's George Washington Memorial Bridge (Aurora Bridge) is dedicated February 22, 1932" by Patricia Long, 2003.

Passage Point (???)

I must emphasise that this is strictly my name for the strait between Lake Union and Portage Bay, which near as I can tell has no real name.  On a map of Seattle it looks big and sloppy compared to the Cuts, or even the Narrows, maybe unworthy of a name.  But it's actually only 1/8th of a mile wide, about 220 yards; I think by any reasonable standard that's a strait, and deserves a name.

(By contrast, the Fremont Cut is 90 yards wide, the Narrows about 150.)

The name comes, of course, from the parks the city built at its north and south ends.  I introduced the northern park May 13 in "Down by the Canal" and showed you, dear Diary, more photos of it in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal" January 1.

The parks are in the shadow of the latest of three bridges to cross this strait:

  1. The Latona Bridge, opened in 1891, torn down in 1919.  Originally for streetcars, but converted to general use when #2 opened.  Seems to have required repairs a lot more often than most of these bridges, but survived the canal's opening as many others did not.
  2. The Latona Bridge, opened in 1901, torn down in 1919.  Designed as a drawbridge in expectation of the canal; designed for bigger streetcars than #1 could handle.
  3. The Ship Canal Bridge, opened in 1962 as part of I-5.

See, besides Waterway, "Latona Bridge and University Bridge (Seattle)" by John Caldbick, 2017.

Portage Bay

This appears to be as neglected among the natural water bodies as the Fremont Cut is among the man-made ones.  A popular restaurant and a trendy neighbourhood are both named after this bay, so it's possible that there are thousands of fascinating web pages out there about Portage Bay that I just can't find, but actually I doubt it.

The smallest of the four bays in the ship canal is the water south of the University District, if one takes the latter as having a border at I-5, and of much of the UW's Seattle campus.  It's also the water west of many of these areas.

Presumably it got smaller and shallower as its neighbours did, and presumably much of it is now, as in Lake Union, basically a water highway.  But despite its relative neglect, I wonder whether Portage Bay might have something its bigger neighbours lack.  Water enters it about halfway north on the bay's eastern coast, and leaves it basically at the bay's northwestern corner.  So what I wonder is whether the southern part of Portage Bay might be more or less shielded from the rush, and might in this respect, at least, resemble southern Portage Bay of before.  Mind, dear Diary, you know I'm no hydrologist.  But I wonder.

Portage Bay's north coast includes two city parks - Northlake and Fritz Hedges Waterway Parks.  Both of these are in the same two pages as North Passage Point, but for the latter "Fritz Hedges Waterway Park", October 20, is also relevant.  Portage Bay's good street end, Sakuma Viewpoint, is next to Fritz Hedges.  The only bridge across the bay with a terminus in North Seattle, the University Bridge, opened in 1919; see the same reference as for the Latona Bridge it replaced.  (State Route 520 crosses Portage Bay entirely south of North Seattle, and not on the famous floating bridge.)

I don't know whether Portage Bay, as here defined, has one, two or three of Lake Union's waterways.  As described in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", waterway 14 overlaps with Northlake Park, at the Lake Union edge of Portage Bay.  Waterway 11 is at Fairview Park in the Eastlake neighbourhood.  I have no clue where waterways 12 and 13 might be.  They're rather more likely to be further north in Eastlake, but it's just possible that one or both is or are instead on the shores of Portage Bay, barely possibly the north shore.  I think they're pretty unlikely to be in parks, which would brag about them as Northlake Park does about 14.

The Montlake Cuts

Two canals have linked Union Bay, still ahead, with Portage Bay.  The first was much smaller, had a built-in dam, and operated in a less ecologically aware period, so as far as we know, only the second had most of the effects I've been describing and have still to describe.

The Portage Canal

The first canal was a few blocks south of the present one.  It was near the present state route 520, as David B. Williams of Waterway says in "Lake Washington Ship Canal (Seattle)", 2017; it was sixteen feet wide.  It opened in 1887; when the Ship Canal lowered Lake Washington in 1916, it became useless as a canal, but wasn't filled in quickly.  (Useful on this, though old, is Don Sherwood's typescript on the history of West Montlake Park, a PDF.)

Near as I can tell, it has to have gone through what is now Washington Park; since that park is no longer in North Seattle, and has no sentimental importance to me, I haven't visited it for you nor described or photographed it for you, dear Diary.

I would think there must have been some sort of bridging arrangement, but don't know how to find out more about that.  (This early canal is much worse documented than the ones in Fremont, though that seems to attract, rather than repel, historians.)

The Montlake Cut proper

Although, or perhaps because, this was a brand-new excavation (unlike the Fremont Cut), it progressed fast, and was pretty much done by 1914 (versus 1915).  It had to wait, dammed, until the planned bridges were funded and their pilings could be sunk; like the Fremont Cut, it was opened in 1916.

Its northern shore is entirely within the UW's main Seattle campus; there are no city parks or street ends there.  It's wider than the Fremont Cut, nearly 120 yards, so perhaps piers are allowed; at any rate, boaters give it some love because of its use by the UW's rowers, as memorialised in the book and movie The Boys in the Boat.  I saw the rowers (though of current teams, not the 1936 one in Boys) several times in recent trips to that part of campus.

Only one bridge has spanned this Cut, the Montlake Bridge, opened in 1925.  For five years before that, the city set up pontoon bridges for events at Husky Stadium, per "Montlake Bridge (Seattle)" by John Caldbick, 2013.

HistoryLink has conferred on this Cut, as on no other body of water this page covers, a "feature" page of its own, "Montlake Cut (Seattle)" by Jennifer Ott of Waterway, 2012.

Union Bay

Union Bay is an example of a bay whose mouth nobody could seriously call a strait, but which nevertheless is clearly defined.  It's essentially a big squarish, circlish blob subtracted from the land, facing Lake Washington to the east.  As it is now, it's the water south of Laurelhurst and most of UW's east campus, east of the rest of campus, and west of some very expensive homes on Webster Point.  I don't know whether its name commemorates the Civil War's winners, or, like Lake Union's, the dream of the canal; or maybe both.

Its northern and western coasts, in North Seattle, are home to one city park, Belvoir Place, introduced May 13 in "Back East, Where the Gardens Are Pretty" and not much mentioned since, and one good street end, the western one for NE 31st St.  The Union Bay Boglands, introduced in the same page but also discussed January 1 in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", are nearby but I think don't directly abut the bay.

Union Bay used to be much, much bigger.  If you've wondered, dear Diary, why the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern tracks didn't give users of the Burke-Gilman Trail today views of Union Bay and Lake Washington comparable to the trail's views further west, well, that's because the rails were laid in the late 1880s, nearly thirty years before Union Bay shrank.  Imagine the Trail as coastal, and that's a pretty good start.  But it gets even worse.  Union Bay has marshes and bogs today, but it used to have really big marshes and bogs.  Picardo Farm, at 25th Ave NE and NE 80th St, was at the northern edge of the wetlands.  On the 1908 topographical map, that's shown to be due to a tributary of Ravenna Creek, most of the wetlands ending around 53rd St - but the water itself came to 45th.

Another ecological effect I infer is a bit harder to describe.  Union Bay in the 19th century wasn't a backwater.  Ravenna Creek, which then had probably the largest watershed in what is now North Seattle, flowed into it, as did Yesler Creek and others.  But the main flow in Lake Washington was from the Sammamish River mouth in the northeast to the Black River in the southeast; Union Bay had little to do with that.  Now, however, Lake Washington is fed by both the Sammamish and, in the southeast, the Cedar River, and it all flows out, rather faster than before, through Union Bay.

The only bridge across Union Bay is the 520 one, hopping islands until it starts floating from the last.

I've shown you, dear Diary, views across each of these bodies of water, except the Narrows.  But the only new photo I happen to have handy is one I took from a shore of Union Bay, trying to catch Mount Rainier, but getting mostly bay instead.


Lake Washington

The canal begins or ends in, um, the second largest lake in Washington, but certainly much the largest near the major population centre of western Washington.  Of course, like Lake Union, Portage Bay, and Union Bay, it used to be bigger, but not enough bigger to have been #1.

The effects of lowering Lake Washington, which of course made it smaller, shallower, and faster-moving, were profound, and exacerbated by the following half-century's hostility to the wetlands that remained.  The swamps now in Magnuson Park aren't those shown there on the 1908 topographical map, but new ones, built in the 1970s after the park expanded with the military's withdrawal.  Waterway's sixth chapter, "Environmental Change", pages 112-127, is primarily about what happened to Lake Washington.  That chapter also covers the mess of rivers at the lake's south end and the changes those endured, though a map or three really would've helped.

Meanwhile in North Seattle, Lake Washington is the water to most places' east, and occasionally to the north, south or even west of some.  The city has three parks along its shores, Magnuson Park, Matthews Beach, and the NE 130th St Street End, and an overlapping four street ends, at NE 130th St, 51st Ave NE, NE 43rd St, and NE 31st St (the eastern one).  The recent Hike 2B page has the references on Magnuson Park.  For Matthews Beach "Go North, Aging Man!" May 6 did the minimum, but see mainly "To the Beaches!" December 1, and the street ends page has more photos.  The NE 130th St Street End, similarly, first appeared May 28 in "Top of the City", part I, but all my photos of it are in the street end page.

We can thank our bridgelessness for Magnuson Park.  According to Wikipedia on the 1963 floating bridge, back around 1960 when the state was deciding where to put the second bridge across Lake Washington, the city advocated the obvious short route from Sand Point to Kirkland.  But the Navy said no, and as a result 520 is south of the canal and we have a gigantic, annoying park instead.  The lake is just as narrow further north, but up there the land route is close enough that it isn't worth the trouble of a bridge.

Anyway, at the north end of Lake Washington we're clearly away from the canal, though not from its effects.  I hope, dear Diary, you've had some fun along the way.

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Friday, January 1, 2021

Canalwards, Foolish Mortal

Dear Diary,

I spent several days in December making short hikes, as I told you some time ago I intended.  These hikes took me to arguably seven parks owned or managed by Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, all south of 43rd St in the University District and Laurelhurst.  And in most of them I found problems with what I've told you, dear Diary, before:  some outright errors of fact, some weasel wording to avoid other errors, and plenty of omissions.  So this page is my attempt to do better by these parks.

None, unfortunately, have restrooms, and only one (the only one this page isn't apologising to) has a water fountain, which I found not running today.

I discovered the hard way in writing this that it's really dumb to copy a modern web page into a Blogspot page as one writes the latter.  (Because Android and/or Chrome wouldn't let me copy just the paragraph I wanted.)  I think the ill effects are confined to me writing this, but I trust, dear Diary, that if anyone reading you sees, in particular, an annoying blue horizontal bar, they'll complain in the comments.  (EDIT 1/1:  Actually, I think I've fixed it.  Let me know if not.)

December 22

Fritz Hedges Waterway Park

This park is on Boat St, west of Brooklyn Ave.  Introduced May 13 in "Down by the Canal", then given full treatment October 20 in "Fritz Hedges Waterway Park".  In the latter page, I wrote:

"Unfortunately, as in the expanded Christie Park, all the furniture is metal."

Nope.


See those discolourations in the long concrete benches?  There are four total; in that shot, one is hidden by the shade.  Let's take a closer look at that one.


I was wrong.  (Heck, I was technically wrong just because of the concrete benches, even without their wooden inserts.)

North Passage Point

This park is between Northlake Way and the water under I-5.  Introduced in "Down by the Canal", and I seem not to have mentioned it to you since, dear Diary.  In that page, I noted that other people being around had cramped my photography.  I also made a big deal out of this park having land, unlike, for example, the next one, so downplayed this park's water views.

Well, on December 22 none of that was an issue.  Here's a landscape:


Now, the builders of I-5 of course chose a narrow point in the water to cross, specifically the strait between Portage Bay and Lake Union.  This means that from this park, one can look at either of those water bodies, or in between, at South Passage Point across the water.

Portage Bay, seen through the University Bridge:


South Passage Point:


Lake Union:


Northlake Park

This is basically a viewpoint on Northlake, a block east of North Passage Point.  I introduced it rather badly in "Down by the Canal", then never mentioned it again.

One of the things I did wrong was spoil my photo of the view with a finger in the shot.  That's what I focused on fixing this time.


Peace Park

This is between 9th and Eastlake Avenues on 40th St, which puts it right next to the University Bridge.  Introduced in "Down by the Canal" with the following wording to avoid saying what I just did:

"This isn't on the canal, but is essentially built into one of the bridges over the canal, the University Bridge."

I did so because the parks department page propounds the cockamamie notion that the park is actually at the intersection of 40th and Pacific Streets, and I refused to believe the evidence of my own eyes, and the street signs there.  In my lists of parks, that's the address I use.  So I went there December 22 to establish the real address.

(To be fair to the department, they may simply mean that the park is on both 40th and Pacific, and indeed I showed you, dear Diary, a photo of the boring Pacific Street side.  It's still an inadequate and misleading address.)

December 23

Fritz Hedges Waterway Park


Yes, it's wooden.

December 29

Union Bay Boglands No. 1 and No. 2

This park, so to speak, is on Surber Drive from 41st St to a little south of 38th St.  Introduced rather confusedly and perfunctorily May 13 in "Back East, Where the Gardens Are Pretty".

What I know now that I didn't know then is that from 1926 to 1966 the city had a landfill there, where about half of the university's east campus is today.  My guess now is that when the city conveyed most of the land to the university, they held back the Surber Drive edge in hopes people would build more mansions with pretty gardens, hopes that were not to be fulfilled.

My further guess is that the two parcels exist because a Seattle Public Utilities pumping station is between them.  At any rate, No. 1's address is "Surber Drive NE & 41st NE", while No. 2 is at "3905 NE Surber Drive".

When I first went there this time, my eyes immediately flew to a green space north of 41st.  A bunch of people had parked there, but it turned out not to be part of the huge Talaris property next door.  Oops:  it's actually an unimproved block of 38th Ave.



(Those photos are actually from December 28.)

The best clue came from the university's own map, which stops short at 38th.  And if you go into the area, differences emerge between the university's Yesler Swamp and the city's Union Bay Boglands.  One is that the swamp's famous boardwalk seems never to come too close to the eastern edge.  Another is that in the city side, but not the university side, there's lots of that welcome green in winter, conifers:


(Yes, I know the green up front is ivy.  Look behind it.)

January 1

And happy new year, dear Diary!  Did you ever expect to get so old?  I certainly didn't expect it of you.

Christie Park

This park is on the southwest corner of 9th Ave and 43rd St.  Introduced May 6 in "Go North, Aging Man!" and then corrected the same day in the first "Foolish Mortal" page; lavishly depicted October 4 in "Christie Park, Expanded, at Sunset".  It's the furthest north of these parks, and the only one I don't (as far as I know) owe an apology to, which, yes, means it's also the one with a water fountain.

In this case, as of today I still can't find any furniture that isn't metal.

Peace Park

I continued south on 9th, which means I reached here.  I decided to see whether Sadako of the Thousand Cranes had been given Christmas candies, but to my surprise found a few actual (and rather bedraggled) cranes, so took a picture.


Northlake Park

This was my main destination today.  One main reason I introduced it badly is that I wanted to complain about the parks department page more than I actually wanted to introduce the park.  The page's text indeed is gibberish to the uninitiated (such as me when I wrote "Down by the Canal"), and focused on things of no interest to most:

"The 7th Avenue NE Street End is not on 7th Avenue or a street end. The property is part waterway, part street right-of-way for NE Northlake Way. The site is located on the southwest edge of the University District, between I-5 and the University bridge, at the intersection of Lake Union Waterway 14 and NE Northlake Way, and across the street from the terminus of 7th Avenue NE. The upland portion of the waterway is owned by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the remainder of the property is street right-of-way owned by Seattle Department of Transportation. The property was included as part of the 2000 Pro Parks Levy to “Develop park at 7th Ave NE street end at Lake Union.” "

I wanted to complain that Northlake Park is not on the official lists of either street ends or waterways.  The writer's cute opening sentence shows that he (I'd bet this paragraph was a man's mistake) anticipated that.  Most of the park is textbook 7th Ave NE Street End, but since 7th wasn't on the list the city adopted, that doesn't matter.  (Now I'm probably speaking gibberish to the uninitiated.  See, please, "North Seattle Street Ends:  Introduction", December 20.)

As for waterways?  With ashen face I discover that the map of Lake Union which, in "Lake Union's North Shore:  Waterways and Street Ends" (October 8) I recommended as listing all the waterways, omits five of them:  7, 10, 12, 13 and 14.  Oops.

So.  I think this is the "upland" part that could have been a very steep waterway (i.e., place to put boats into the water or take them out):


That's on the left as one faces the water.

Thinking as I went there that it really was a street end, I took my standard three photos.  But the street that ends is no beauty, and the land the city claims (though not under the street end law) doesn't look like much in my photos.  So that leaves only the park's main point, its view.  My third try:


Good night, dear Diary.

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Monday, December 21, 2020

Street Ends: North Lake Union

Dear Diary,

This is the first page in this series whose street ends are all publicly accessible. Unfortunately, they aren't much to look at - in this area, the waterways beat the street ends hands down for enjoyment of the shore - but anyway here they are.

This page covers two to four street ends, depending how you count.  I introduced one of them, which is an official Seattle park, way back in June in "At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work?", two more in "Lake Union's North Shore" in October (which is also the page anyone curious about the waterways should see), and one, the least impressive of all, is new.

These photos may not be good, but at least they're better than those in the other pages.

Latona Ave NE Street End

Photo 1 - The street that ends, photographed October 14

Photo 2 - The land the city appears to claim, photographed October 13

Photos 3 - Two views over the water, photographed October 13 (first) and 14


Sunnyside Ave N Street End, aka Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp

Photos 1 - photographed October 13


So wait a minute - the street that ends ends right at the shoreline!  There is no street end here!  I think there really isn't, but let's first finish with the photos, because there certainly is a view.

Photo 3 - photographed October 14


OK, now for the mystery.  The city's GIS tool says this is the Sunnyside Ave N street end, but the appendices to the Cheshiahud Loop plans tell (p. 90) a different story.  (For links to both see "Lake Union's North Shore".)  They correctly note that the boat ramp is a waterway (a place for boats to enter and leave the water), and since Lake Union waterways are owned by the state, they infer that this one is too.

Well, this would just be a weird fantasy on the part of the trail planners except that they offer as corroboration another location for the Sunnyside Ave N street end.

Sunnyside Ave N Street End

Photo 1 - photographed October 14

Yes, this is where the instance of Sunnyside north of the boat ramp ends, at N Pacific St.

Photos 2 - photographed October 14

The Cheshiahud Loop people say that compensation for the actual street end was made in the form of a "planted median".  Now, you can see there's no planted median in Sunnyside or Pacific here.  But the Burke-Gilman Trail runs south of Pacific, it's split between pedestrians and cyclists there, and as it happens there are plantings between the two.  Those plantings extend well beyond any reasonable size for the compensation, I basically think this theory is as lunatic as the boat ramp one, but I took photos just in case.


The Burke-Gilman Trail and the Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp both exist, and both are public parks.  Both appear, from the city's real property report, to have title complexities, but unless there's some legal need to involve the street end laws in resolving those, I don't see any point in calling anything near Sunnyside Ave N a street end.

Fremont Bridge (Fremont Ave N) Street End

I'm pretty sure I did the street end research that underlies the introduction to this series on October 15, before setting out for Ballard.  On the way there, I saw another bridge split above me:



And I took pictures of the Fremont Bridge street end.  There's no street that ends - nothing analogous to Eastlake Place here for me to fantasise about - so no photo 1.

The GIS tool says this street end is incorporated into the Burke-Gilman Trail.

Photo 2 - photographed October 16

Photo 3 - photographed October 16

Well, the Fremont Bridge is at the far northwest corner of Lake Union, and this street end faces west, so that's actually a view of the ship canal.

Next stop Salmon Bay, but it's raining so hard where I am that I'm going to wait before trying to write it.  Until then, dear Diary.
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